by Trevor Hoyle
And yet it defied every instinct, every one of his senses, to accept the prevailing scientific evidence that intelligent life was nowhere to be found throughout the cosmos except on the nine planetary and five planetoidal states. Man was not alone; nothing would make him believe it.
*
Christian Queghan had spent the morning in the silent room reading a Paper entitled Concerning the Hypothesis of Determining Problematical Futures by Professor Milton Blake. Blake’s field of study – Meta Psychical Research – had links with his own subject of Myth Technology, and as Blake was to be one of the guest speakers at the forthcoming Scenario Planning Symposium he had felt duty-bound to read it. Not that this had been a chore: the Paper was concise, cogently argued and introduced a number of concepts worthy of further investigation. The most interesting of these was a technique Blake was pioneering in the Psychic Conservation Unit in which electrical brain impulses could be processed and converted into a three-dimensional visual display. Although still in the experimental stage and technically undervalued (the necessary funds hadn’t been allocated to go beyond prototype hardware) there was little doubt in Queghan’s mind that it would provide a useful predictive capability.
But now, allowing his concentration to lapse, he was suddenly tired – due not so much to the work, he suspected, as to the indefatigable Castel who had the night before kept him talking into the small hours. Queghan detected within himself a wave of vague irritability and tried to analyse it; was it something innate, a mutual antipathy between them, a fact of body chemistry – or was he simply annoyed at Castel for blathering on about his own specialized field of interest and not once pausing to inquire about his, Queghan’s, current preoccupation? Scientists could be petty, jealous people swayed by childish emotions and irrelevancies, and spiteful too on occasion.
He came out of the MyTT Research annexe. The sun, predictably, was not shining; the forecast had said clear sunny spells and yet the sky was overcast with dank grey cloud. The weather was controlled – in theory at any rate – though Queghan sometimes wondered whether the apparatus was a product of technological innovation or wishful thinking. He was a man of forbidding height, noticably thin, with a face that had been unkindly described as ‘cadaverous’ this was too severe and was belied by an expression which softened his features and made him appear almost dreamy. He wore this expression now, of gentle contemplation, as he walked along the gravel path between the neat sprinkled lawns, lost in speculation on Blake’s Paper. He had met Blake just once – friendly and alert-faced – at the MyTT Open Science Day when two hundred scientists in related fields had gathered together in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Yet there had been a more positive and fruitful interchange of views and opinions that day than was possible over six months of communication via official channels.
Approaching the commissary he was struck by the sudden thought that Castel, in his obsessive two-hour monologue, might have been betraying a twinge of professional jealousy. The funds allocated to the TFC Lab had been quadrupled while Castel’s request for more money to redeploy the Archives had been politely but resolutely declined. Could that be the reason, Queghan wondered, the doors opening to admit him; maybe Castel was flesh and blood after all and not, as rumour had it, a cyberthetic complex. It was an amusing notion.
Johann Karve, the Director of MyTT, was at the high table with several of his senior research staff. The conversation went on uninterrupted as Queghan took a seat, but he had seen the Director’s brief passing glance and almost imperceptible nod of greeting. Johann was adept at keeping everyone on a happy equilibrium, counterbalancing the excesses of personality, one against the other. Some thought him perversely eccentric, almost a dodderer; it was an impression he didn’t seek to discourage, but at times to actively foster. As now – nodding gently to a point Brenton was making with his usual emphatic fervour: the hot-blooded idealist in full flow.
‘I doubt whether the Project would significantly benefit,’ the Director said when Brenton had finished. ‘It would extend it in scope but not in penetration.’ He looked in Queghan’s direction. ‘Does Blake’s Paper add to our problems or help solve them; Chris?’
‘It’s promising,’ Queghan replied cautiously. ‘Some of his assumptions are shots in the dark, but then whose aren’t?’
‘Which Paper is this?’ Brenton asked quickly, snapping at the bait. Johann Karve’s eyes touched Queghan’s for a moment, an amused invitation silently acknowledged. Queghan explained briefly some of the ideas the Paper proposed for establishing the existence of – as Blake termed them – ‘Problematical Futures’ and, if such did exist, how to track, plot and record them. This line of work was parallel with Queghan’s research in the TFC Lab, but whereas Milton Blake was investigating the theoretical possibility of alternative futures, the MyTT Research Institute was concerned with exploring them in the real sense: actually injecting someone into a Temporal Flux Centre and (if he wasn’t crushed or obliterated in the process) discovering what took place beyond the boundaries of the physical universe, where the laws of space, time and matter were rendered meaningless. The main problem was retrieval. It was very much like, as Director Karve once succinctly remarked, ‘A blind man trying to capture a butterfly by reaching barehanded through a compressor blade moving at 15,000 revs a minute’.
There were other difficulties too: how to know precisely where and when and in what alternative future the injectee had landed – mythical or actual? How to communicate with him, and, supposing communication to be possible, how to arrange a specific spacetime coordinate to facilitate retrieval? It was fairly easy to send a man in but would he ever come out again?
Blake’s proposal of a mind waves/visual display interface was a promising line of inquiry, for if developed to a sufficiently high degree of technical sophistication it would permit the injectee to transmit images back to the satellite-Control laboratory; and perhaps it might be capable of even more. Queghan could visualize it being used as a predictive facility, whereby the brain patterns of the injectee could be processed to give an accurate and reliable forecast, prior to injection, of the future he was about to enter. Hopefully he would be able to choose any one of a series of multiple universes. This was abstract theory, as Queghan would be the first to admit, and yet on paper it was mathematically feasible; the nuts and bolts of the operation were another matter.
‘I should like to see that for myself,’ Brenton said. He had a solemn young face with dark hard eyes and a thin mouth which would be reluctant to concede a smile. He was new to the Institute and anxious not to miss out on anything. ‘I take it the Paper will be circulated?’
Queghan said, ‘Of course,’ and looked at Brenton, whose stare was blank, impassive, yet with a touch of veiled insolence. He was on his way to the top and determined to get there by whatever means were to hand. Queghan could have smiled but didn’t. He wondered what the young man would find when he got there.
Karve sipped his coffee and mentioned that the newsmedia had been pestering him that morning. ‘The two banes of my life,’ he said wearily. ‘The newsmedia and piles. Both irritatingly painful.’ The current rumour said that Project Tempus was reaching the point where it might arouse public interest, especially if a live mission was about to be undertaken. Who was the man, they wanted to know, who was the heroic volunteer about to be launched into the Unknown?
Brenton was alerted. ‘Has the selection been made?’ he asked the Director.
Johann Karve smiled and stuffed tobacco into his pipe. He possessed an inward stillness, an area of calm, which engendered confidence and trust; his staff were loyal to the degree of religious faith. ‘There’s a short-list, as you know, Martin. But you have my word that no final decision has been taken. When it is everyone concerned will be notified. We are not a department of the Polizei.’
‘What did you say to the newsmedia?’ Karla Ritblat asked. She was head of the Psycho-Med Faculty whose job it was to prepare the heroic volunteer for injection into
the Unknown. The Director, with his aptitude for the deft phrase, had referred to her as ‘our chief head-expander’. Karla was forty-six, stiff, unyielding, grey-haired; she had chosen a career in place of child-bearing and had that wary acidic manner which unattractive middle-aged women seem to acquire like defensive armour-plating. She didn’t find Karve’s description either apposite or amusing, believing that a scientific establishment was no place for levity.
Karve glanced along the table, benign amidst the pipe smoke. ‘I issued the routine bulletin. In any case, they’re only interested in disaster and catastrophe. Talk to them about the principles of Myth Technology or the theories of Temporal Flux Centres and they assume a staggering indifference.’
‘Which is perhaps just as well,’ Queghan said. ‘If you told them that the world they inhabit is founded on an untenable premise they might really panic. At least before you could explain it in words of one syllable.’
‘Is it necessary to be so melodramatic?’ Karla Ritblat said, appraising him with her cold, fish-like stare. ‘That kind of talk, if heard by outsiders, does cause panic.’ Queghan wondered, not for the first time, whether Karla had ever considered herself a suitable subject for psycho examination. She would make a most interesting case-study.
‘So you think Blake might have something?’ Karve said.
‘The visual display technique – if it works – would provide the kind of predictive capability we’ve been looking for. But there is one problem.’
Brenton put his elbows on the table. ‘Which is?’
‘The brain patterns, when processed and converted into visual display, wouldn’t necessarily present the image that the injectee experiences once he’s passed beyond the event horizon into Temporal Flux. It’s possible that we could pick up his subconscious patterns. In other words, his private fantasy instead of the objective reality.’
Brenton snorted rudely. ‘I should have thought,’ he said, glancing at the Director, ‘that that was the purpose of the exercise. Wherever the injectee happens to find himself, in whatever alternative future, imaginary or otherwise, then that’s where he’ll be. To speak of “an objective reality” is surely begging the question.’
‘That’s a valid point,’ Karve said, swathed in blue-grey smoke. ‘The injectee will create his own alternative future, and, providing we know in advance what it is – and when it is – we can effect retrieval.’
Queghan inclined his head in a small gesture of compliance. ‘Point taken. But each of us has an infinite number of subjective realities: we externalize some, repress others. How are we to know which of these – which one specifically – the injectee has chosen to enter? He may not know himself until after injection has taken place. And we can’t plot them all, not even cyberthetically.’
Everyone was looking towards Brenton. It was like a game of intellectual ping-pong: a point gained here, a point dropped there. Brenton’s thin serious face betrayed nothing of what was going on inside his head. He looked at Queghan for a long moment as if debating how best to reply, then shrugged and waved his hand dismissively. ‘Until the technique has been evaluated in the TFC Lab I don’t see how we can progress beyond an exchange of personal opinions. I should like to see the Paper before committing myself one way or the other.’
‘Very sensible,’ Karve said, smiling genially at everyone through the pipe smoke; the subject was now – for the moment – closed.
The sunshine promised by the weather bureau was at last breaking through. Queghan enjoyed it, wandering across the trim lawns to the small artificial lake with its carefully nurtured greenery growing in artful profusion by the water’s edge. The sky’s glassy reflection lay broken and fragmented on the surface of the water, a shifting pattern of blue sky and cumulus cloud tinged with pink. Such a day as this – with the green grass rippling freshly under the sun and the towers of cloud piled high against the blueness – such a day reminded him of the Battle of Britain, September 1940, Pre-Colonization. He had made a special study of the period, investigated all the Archive material, and run and re-run the old newstapes, and had gained what in the jargon of Myth Technology was known as ‘sympathetic identification’ with those few crucial months at the beginning of World War II.
Now he conjured up those fresh young faces in their leather helmets and goggles, small groups of three and four lolling on the grass in their fur-lined flying jackets and zippered boots, waiting for the tannoy to hiccup into life and blurt out the order to ‘Scramble!’. There was the pungent whiff of glycol on the breeze, the stutter of an engine being tuned by the mechanics, and somewhere faintly in the background from a battered wooden radio with a speaker the shape of a sea-shell – from inside a hut with sunshine slanting through the open doorway – the sound of Vera Lynn singing something about white cliffs and bluebirds.
To Queghan the period had the charm and engaging innocence that was the stuff of myth. He could feel and taste its ‘realness’ even though it was so long ago that the only reference to it was a supplementary notation in the post-graduation college program. One of the things which intrigued and fascinated him was being able to see with his own eyes how the people looked and behaved; the early Twentieth was notable for being the first period in history to preserve visual documentary evidence of its people, events, customs and social mores. To actually see the pioneers of relativity physics, for instance, how they looked and talked, was an experience which thrilled him.
And for the Myth Technologist it gained in fascination by being a time when such concepts as the Unified Psychic Field Theory hadn’t even been dreamt of, much less formulated as a valid scientific premise. Of course they knew, these early pioneers, that energy and matter were interchangeable, but it was as if they possessed knowledge and didn’t know what to do with it: they had found the key but didn’t know which door it opened, had found the answers but weren’t sure of the questions.
The proposal of a Unified Psychic Field – a theoretical framework which would encompass all known psi phenomena and relate them to the laws of the physical universe – didn’t arrive until much later; and still the Theory hadn’t achieved complete respectability and acceptance. This was one of the aims of Myth Technology and the related area of Meta-Psychical Research. Past and future myths were repositories of collective knowledge and experience, meaningful pieces in the grand jigsaw, and their investigation would reveal the links (or ‘leys’ as the jargon had it) which connected everything – whether real or abstract, animate or inanimate – with every other thing in the Metagalaxy. There was a secret pattern, an invisible warp and weft of spacetime which could be detected only by psychic means; a gateway existed through which it was possible to pass in order to observe the hidden symmetry, the celestial clockwork ticking quietly away with the flawless precision of a Caesium clock. The gateway was via controlled injection into Temporal Flux, beyond which nothing was positively known – except that it might lead to an infinite series of alternative futures, a multiplicity of universes, each one existing in its own unique spacetime continuum.
Queghan became aware that his wife was trying to contact him. She was several miles distant, at home, alone, and six months pregnant. He pressed the tab in his lapel to acknowledge the signal that Oria’s voice murmured in his ear. She had been to see the doctor and he had recommended a course of treatment to correct an endocrine imbalance; there was no cause for alarm, she was feeling perfectly all right, he was not to worry. But Queghan, despite her assurance, couldn’t help adopting the role of anxious father-to-be.
I’ll come home now. You and the baby are more important than the Project.’
‘It isn’t necessary, Chris. Really.’ She sounded composed and cheerful. ‘He said everything would be fine, providing I take it easy and don’t worry. There’s really no need for you to leave the Institute.’
‘Okay. As long as you do as he says.’
‘I promise.’
She was, Queghan felt, telling him the truth, though at this distance it was di
fficult to know for sure. In any event he didn’t want to alarm her by acting hastily and changing the routine; but he would speak to the doctor privately and satisfy himself that all was well. After all, it was their first child: a girl, by mutual agreement.
*
Brenton looked ill. His dark eyes burned fiercely in an unhealthy complexion which he seemed to have taken pains to acquire; it was as if he had to display his seriousness and dedication like a badge of office. Queghan hadn’t realized before how pale and edgy he had become.
They were in the corner of the TFC Lab, Brenton perched uncomfortably on the sill and leaning forward as if to study an invisible object on the floor. Normally he kept very much to himself, preferring his calculus graphs and Minkowskian geometric projections to human company. Brenton was an expert in cyberthetics, a brilliant mind trained in the application of machine intelligence to control and communication systems. He was responsible for the cyberthetic complex which would endow the Injection Vehicle with consciousness so that the Vehicle would possess a live deductive intelligence with the capability to think, to reason, to make decisions. Queghan was the antithesis of Brenton, not at all bright in mathematics: his mind worked intuitively, some might even say (Karla Ritblat for one) erratically.
Brenton said anxiously, ‘I think you’ll understand this, I hope you will.’ He kept looking at the floor. ‘It’s imperative that I’m selected. I know the machine, we work well together, she would regard anyone else as an intruder. The Director must understand that.’
‘She can be programmed to be compatible with anyone’s EEG, you yourself made the point in the systems profile,’ Queghan said. He tried to register the neurochemical reactions in Brenton’s cerebral cortex but there was nothing out of the ordinary taking place. He did detect an unsteady pulse-rate and discharge of adrenalin but these were in keeping with Brenton’s agitated condition.