by Trevor Hoyle
‘He has a sense of humour. The trouble is that he laughs at all the wrong things. And the man himself is humourless.’
‘Yes, I suppose he must have a sense of humour,’ Eva said, holding the fixed smile like a mask, ‘otherwise with a face like that why bother to get up in the morning?’ She looked into the room. ‘Do I really have to sleep with that bow-legged short-arsed toad?’
‘Careful. Some of them can lip-read. I shouldn’t worry too much about the sex thing. I’d be surprised if he could get it halfway up.’
‘What are you giving him at the moment?’
I caught Bormann’s eye and nodded to him pleasantly. ‘Do you mean medication? Too many different things to remember offhand. I should say somewhere in the region of thirty different preparations. I might try something new on him in the morning, I haven’t decided.’
‘Add bromide to the list, for Christ’s sake,’ Eva said, smiling up at me with empty eyes.
*
The factory in Budapest is now in full swing and Felix is putting a new ‘line’ into production: a sulphonamide we have called Ultraseptyl, which should be on sale to the public by Christmas. This is a compound I came across by accident when I was messing about in the Clinic one day. Felix says it tastes revolting, but people don’t believe medicines are doing them any good unless they taste nasty; the nastier the better, I say.
The last three or four months have been extremely satisfying and fruitful – not to say lucrative. As concessionnaires for the combined armed forces we have our fingers, Felix and I, in many pies. And certain schemes which I instigated are coming along nicely, with just the odd nudge to keep them on course. Altogether a gratifying state of affairs.
Yesterday afternoon I came across Elisabeth crying in one of the offices upstairs. It seems that her young man (I vaguely recall he was on Himmler’s staff) has been given a posting, without any warning whatsoever to the Eastern Province. I commiserated with her and suggested that dinner in a quiet restaurant I knew in the Unter Den Linden might help to take her mind off this painful separation.
She was reluctant until I happened to mention that I was on good terms with Reichsführer Himmler and that he might be persuaded to countermand the order. ‘There can be no harm in trying,’ I said, patting her shoulder. ‘After all, he’s only human.’
Elisabeth thanked me for my kindness and agreed to accept my invitation. We dined by candlelight at the Biarritz and she, in her misery I expect, drank more wine than was good for her. In any event I had to support her as we left the restaurant and she fell asleep on my shoulder in the cab. I rummaged in her bag and found the key to the front door and had to carry her upstairs to the first floor apartment.
Once inside I dumped her on the bed and went into the tiny kitchen to make black coffee. I do not like women passing out on me: it is rather futile, I always think, and such a waste when a woman cannot accommodate her partner’s desires in the conscious state; besides which it is insulting to the partner to be faced with dry orifices in a comatose body.
Carrying her up the stairs had set the ache off in my shoulder, memento of a skiing accident in my youth when I had fallen heavily and lacerated the flesh. I swung my left arm a couple of times to ease the pain.
Elisabeth was still insensible. I made her swallow three tablets and wash them down with coffee. They stimulated her nervous system and she came groggily to her senses by which time I had undressed her and was preparing to mount. When she had recovered sufficiently to realize my intention she struck out with her fists and struggled to extricate herself from beneath my squatting embrace (I was astride her abdomen).
‘Elisabeth,’ I said, catching hold of her wrists and pressing her arms to the eiderdown – she hadn’t shaved her armpits, I noticed: ‘there’s no need for all this. It’s only me, Theo. You remember, Theodor Morell. I promised to speak to Himmler on your behalf.’
She calmed down and lay there staring at me. Her eyes were tense, frightened, though there was also a look – of sacrifice? – of resignation? – I did not recognize.
‘That’s better,’ I said, smiling down on her. ‘You won’t help your young man by struggling, will you, Liebchen?’
She lay still, her breasts rising and falling, watching me, saying nothing, the rush of air audible in her nostrils.
‘Open your legs for the doctor, there’s a good girl.’
She did so and it gave me pleasure to see her eyes contract and the spasm of pain cross her face as I entered her. She was tight and smooth, perhaps not quite slippery enough.
Pumping away, my face next to hers, I could see from the corner of my eye the dark straggle of hair underneath her arm and it suddenly occurred to me (all my best ideas come thus, instantaneously, out of nowhere) that if I could manufacture lice powder in bulk and supply the entire Germany Army my fortune would be made.
4
Proemptosis
‘You blundered in where angels fear to tread,’ Johann Karve said, puffing pipesmoke into the air. It rose above his head like a grey wraith.
‘You should have warned me that the woman was a hardliner.’ Queghan shook his head slowly, baffled, slightly irritable. ‘Why do people like that choose to work at MyTT? If they don’t understand and sympathize with our aims why come here in the first place?’
‘Professor deGrenier is an extremely capable scientist.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘And we do need such people. It’s all very well when you go off on one of your blue sky sessions, or whatever you get up to in that monk’s cell of yours, but without people like deGrenier the hardware to put your schemes into operation would never get developed.’ He regarded Queghan sternly from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
‘RECONPAN has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was a Research Committee decision to fund it. I’m not responsible.’
‘No, that’s right, I am.’
‘I’m sorry, Johann.’ Queghan got up and paced about. ‘It’s just that the bloody woman wouldn’t even meet me halfway. I don’t know what’s going on, I just have this instinctive feeling that something somewhere is wrong. But how do you explain that to a hardliner? DeGrenier won’t accept anything unless it’s in black and white on a cyberthetic print-out.’
His annoyance, Karve realized, had deeper roots than Queghan was prepared to admit. Perhaps he felt guilty. The Director said casually:
‘I don’t suppose you looked into her mind.’
Queghan carried on pacing. Finally he did say, ‘It wasn’t intentional, maybe for a moment or two.’ He wouldn’t meet Karve’s eye. ‘She wouldn’t realize, Johann. Probably feel uncomfortable and then forget all about it. It’s second nature with me, you know that.’
‘Hardliners are suspicious of mythographers as it is without you poking around in their heads. And Pouline deGrenier isn’t a fool, she’d guess what you were up to.’
Queghan paced. He was tall and rangy but there was an abundance of nervous energy that his body couldn’t contain. Karve knew that the physical activity was simply a displacement of intellectual frustration. Queghan was stuck for a direction and the signposts were either misleading or nonexistent.
‘Did you read the CENTiNEL report?’ asked the Director.
‘Yes.’
‘Odd, isn’t it?’
‘I’d hardly describe the disintegration of spacetime as “odd”.’
‘You’re being churlish again.’
‘It’s the mood I’m in.’
‘Have we got it wrong, do you suppose? Is there another interpretation – a simple one – we’ve overlooked?’
‘We’re assuming the data are correct.’
‘They’ve been verified by cyberthetic analysis.’
‘As far as we know the rate of decay of mu-mesons has never altered. We know – we thought we knew – how they behaved, and now all at once we observe a series of particle interactions which don’t fit the pattern,’ Queghan sat down. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
/> ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t say that.’ Karve gave a wan smile. ‘My guesses aren’t worth two a penny at present.’ He puffed some more smoke into the air. ‘If we go right back to the earliest phase, the time of the primeval atom, we know that there must have been an equivalent number of anti-protons and anti-neutrons in existence to complement the positively-charged particles—’
‘Quantum theory tells us so but we don’t know it for a fact. There was nobody around at the time to collect samples.’
‘We have to have a premise of some kind,’ Karve said, not unreasonably. ‘We didn’t at one time believe in the existence of Temporal Flux Centres and now we find them throughout the universe. As the only man on the fourteen Colonized States to have been inside one I should have thought you’d grant me the courtesy of an accepted hypothesis.’
Queghan said, ‘The thought in your mind is that I’m being churlish again.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re right, I am, carry on.’
‘So we have anti-particles. We also have White Holes, as complementary companions to Temporal Flux Centres; and we mustn’t forget your particular favourites, the mythical anti-quark family.’
‘They’d never forgive you if you left them out.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Now as far as we know all anti-particles are existing in minus time, which is the mirror-image of the spatio-temporal frame of reference in which we and our universe exist. Am I going too fast for you?’
‘I’m keeping up.’
‘Doesn’t all this suggest something to you?’
‘Not so far.’
‘I’ll give you a word: proemptosis.’
Karve sucked on his pipe and awaited Queghan’s reaction. A long time, relatively speaking, elapsed. Then eventually:
‘The mu-mesons are interacting with their anti-particle equivalents and therefore seem to be decaying before the appointed time. Hence proemptosis.’
‘Yes,’ Karve said, smiling faintly.
‘In fact they might not be decaying at all in minus time. We could be observing the process in reverse, like a film run backwards.’
‘The anti-matter universe interacting with our own. Exactly! Theoretically we know that it exists but we can never seem to point to a specific occurrence and say: “There it is – the matter/anti-matter interface”. This might well be it, the specific point in spacetime where the two coexist.’
‘Is it testable? Could we devise a program for CENTiNEL to verify it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Karve said, shaking his head. ‘That’s beyond the scope of Myth Technology. We’d have to talk to the astrophysicists. CENTiNEL is their baby.’
Queghan mulled over the consequences of Karve’s theory. And its pitfalls. How on earth could you devise a controlled experiment that had to take place in minus time? The very concept was, by definition, untenable. He tried to visualize this other universe moving on a reciprocal course in another stratum of spacetime: it would contain galaxies and nebulae, solar systems and planets, and presumably life of some sort. What was happening on these alternate planes of existence? What kind of history was being written on these anti-worlds existing in minus time? Perhaps a similar history to that of their own universe, yet with certain inconsistencies …
Supposing, Queghan thought, the idea suddenly taking hold, there was a person called Queghan (an anti-person) who was even now, at this moment (anti-moment), contemplating the possibility of another Queghan (himself) existing in an alternative universe? His alternate self, composed of anti-particles, sitting in an office on top of a pyramidal structure wondering if there was another version of himself?
An interesting cosmological and metaphysical speculation, Queghan (Mark I) thought wryly. And why stop at two? There might be fifty, a thousand, 1010 Queghans all busily contemplating their cosmic navels. But as usual he was running ahead of himself.
‘Is it worth a try?’ Karve asked.
‘In the absence of anything else I’d have to say yes; but how do we go about it? It’s difficult enough trying to imagine a universe existing in minus time without having to conduct experiments there. But it can’t simply be a mirror-image, can it? There must be other factors, other inconsistencies.’
‘That’s where proemptosis fits in,’ Karve said, squinting through the pipesmoke. ‘The occurrence of an event before the calculated date. We have to sniff out any events which don’t seem to follow in natural progression. It could be that their entire time sequence is out of kilter.’
‘Yes,’ Queghan agreed. ‘And maybe ours is too.’
*
Queghan didn’t dwell on the mysterious Dr Morell. Although it was still lodged in a corner of his mind and nagged at him now and then, the apparent ‘coincidence’ was pushed aside and in its place he erected Karve’s scaffolding of a hypothesis regarding the supposed matter/anti-matter interface. He pondered on this, and the paradoxical nature of minus time, the strange phenomenon of proemptosis, and all the while tried to discover a link, or ‘ley’, which would connect one thing with another and so bring order to the random scatter of theory, instinct, blind chance and probability.
Another factor, which ought to have concerned him more, was his wife’s increasing disorientation. She was inhabiting the real world less and less, concerning herself with detailed scenarios for historical reconstructions – at the moment researching mid-Twentieth America Pre-Colonization.
One evening after dinner he asked her why she was digging so far back into the history of Old Earth. ‘What is it that fascinates you?’ Queghan asked, twirling the crystal brandy glass in his long fingers.
‘That’s where it all began. They must have had a special feeling for living, a reverence for natural things which we’ve lost.’
‘Not judging by the newstapes.’ Queghan too had studied the mid-Twentieth and made a number of mythological surveys. The era was rich in symbolism. ‘They revered the planet so much they almost killed it – the ruptured biosphere, remember.’
‘We made ours,’ Oria said; ‘We shaped it into a lump and hacked it around. The custom-built planet, suitable for all ages, races, colours and creeds.’ There was disgust in her voice.
‘You want to return to nature?’ Queghan mocked, ‘Become the protoplastic woman and start from scratch?’
‘There’s nothing wrong in trying to regain our roots.’
‘You sound like a sociology textbook. What roots? They’re right here, all around you.’
It was an argument they had rehearsed many times until it had grown stale. Queghan couldn’t understand what drove her back into the past; it was an evasion of reality; neither could he understand why this should annoy him the way it did, and not understanding any of these things annoyed him even more.
Oria said, ‘You have your work. It fulfils you. You lose yourself in it and find yourself in it.’
‘You’re a trained archivist,’ Queghan pointed out. He sensed chauvinistic blackmail and he wasn’t having any. ‘If you want a job you could get one easily enough: MyTT would take you back tomorrow.’
Oria covered her eyes. ‘Emotionally I’m blank. I can’t feel for things. Everything tastes dead.’
Queghan didn’t know what to say to this. They went out into the garden. It was a calm night, the wind barely moving the leaves on the huge plane trees. The smaller of the two moons was a pale crescent rising in the eastern sky. The configurations of stars sharpened in icy brilliance as the darkness came on. Somewhere out there, Queghan reflected, shone the sun of Old Earth, too faint to be seen with the naked eye. An average star of no special significance, which somehow by accident had given birth to a species of intelligent creatures who so far were alone in the universe. It was true that their explorations had been tentative and minuscule in cosmic terms – no more than a few thousand light-years – and the galaxy must surely be teeming with life: the law of statistical probability made this fact self-evident. What would it do to the human race when the first shock of contact was made �
�� the confrontation of alien cultures with nothing in common but the stars?
Some scientists believed that contact had been made already. Some of those engaged in MetaPsychical Research were of the opinion that intelligent life was at this moment communicating with the Colonized States but that human technology was incapable of deciphering the messages. They pointed to the radio chatter from the stars which, if only it could be interpreted correctly, would form a coherent signal from other beings elsewhere in the galaxy.
Queghan kept an open mind on this subject. The related sciences of Myth Technology and MetaPsychical Research sometimes worked at cross-purposes but in the long term they each contributed to the sum total of knowledge regarding man’s place in the scheme of things. For instance, MetaPsychical Research had done much to relate human neurochemistry to the elemental forces of the universe, the ‘celestial clockwork of the Metagalaxy’ as it was known to the purists.
In contrast his own field was concerned with psi phenomena and its relation to the four prime energy sources. They knew, and had known for a long time, that human thought could affect such random events as the radioactive fission of atomic nuclei. The production of ‘mind stuff’ was a scientifically accepted fact, the research data were irrefutable; yet how and why this was so had still to be explained.
It was this search that had led him into the murky regions of quarks and anti-quarks, the genus of particles whose existence could not be proven but which had to exist if the material universe was an objective entity and not simply a figment of the imagination. ‘I think I am, therefore I am,’ was still the most telling proof of all for the ultimate reality of the mythical quark.
A bright steady speck of light came from behind the trees, heading due north. It was one of the satellite beacons circumnavigating Earth IVn: homing fixes for incoming shuttles. Queghan felt a sudden yearning to go into space. It was like the call of the sea the old mariners had experienced, the compulsive biological urge to cross uncharted oceans and discover unknown continents. There was life out there somewhere amongst those billions of winking stars; they were calling to him, a vast cosmic whispering like the seductive lure of the sirens of ancient mythology.