by Trevor Hoyle
She thought it so ironic that despite mankind’s progress through the centuries, the advances that had been made in every branch of human endeavour, that despite all this the human race was still shackled to the basic biological urge: the genitalia were now, as ever, the focal point of existence, constant reminder that the species hadn’t really progressed beyond its origins as a cave-dwelling tool-making primate at the mercy of its neurochemical instincts.
There was a sound from the laboratory – the click of a circuit-breaker – and Pouline roused herself from this mood of morbid introspection. She thought: I’m getting to be like an old maid. Next I’ll be looking under the bed in case – let’s face it, in the hope – there’s a man hiding there.
She went through into the laboratory and stood for some minutes listening to the hushed electro-mechanical purr, the soft gurgling fluids and clicking relays, watching the dials in their green fluorescent portholes. It was beautiful, it was all very beautiful: she felt a nervous thrill in her stomach and upper arms – RECONPAN was her baby! A new and completely original technique to recreate in thermoplastic the brain of someone long dead. There was no actual cranium of course (science still couldn’t emulate nature to that degree of sophistication) but they had been able to achieve, using solid-state germanium micro-circuitry, a precise simulation of billions of neurological cells linked by electrochemical pathways.
Every component of the brain was faithfully reproduced in the units ranged against the walls; the cerebellum, the cerebrum, the cerebral cortex, the limbic system and the reticular activating system, and along the ceiling a gantry carried thick multicoloured cables representing the bundles of nerves – the corpus collosum – connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.
The major problem had been to artificially stimulate the tissue cultures to receive and transmit electrochemical data. Originally they had hoped to construct the brain entirely of germanium circuitry but tests had shown that what in fact they were creating was not a brain at all – something not dissimilar to the cyberthetic system. The tissue cultures, immersed in a solution of proteins, amino-acids and inorganic salts, were essential if RECONPAN was to possess the qualities which made the human brain a unique organism: self-awareness, memory, innovative feedback, and above all the capability to think, to reason, to make decisions.
This was where Karla Ritblat had become involved. As head of the Psycho-Med Faculty she was the Institute’s specialist in organic structures. The problem, only recently overcome, was how to make the tissue cultures receptive to electrochemical impulses; without this facility the brain would have been able to store millions of memory traces but wouldn’t have known what to do with them – rather like a gigantic data-handling complex where the janitor had forgotten to turn on the power. It was all there but it wouldn’t work.
Now it should. The research involved had been painstaking and the technology highly advanced: each individual neuron cell in the human brain operates on a power requirement of one one thousand millionth of a watt; the entire brain needs only ten watts to function normally. The problem facing the RECONPAN team was how to power the multi-billion celled complex without overloading it and blowing every circuit. It would have been comparable to a person suffering a severe and permanent brainstorm – nothing remaining but a blank-eyed autistic zombie.
Standing before the winking patterns of light in the darkened laboratory, Pouline deGrenier hoped and prayed that it was a problem solved. They wouldn’t know for certain until experimental trials began in twenty-four hours. She thought with a sudden spasm of fear: Twenty-four hours. Was it really so near? After all the grinding effort, the years of work, the meticulous research … she didn’t want it to start. It was too final. The thought of failure numbed her. Better to travel in hopeful expectation than to arrive. But this, she knew full well, was foolish thinking.
You’re behaving like a female, she admonished herself, and immediately thought, What the hell, that’s what I am. Female. I should go out and celebrate. Have a drink, share a joke, have a laugh, get laid—
It kept coming back to that. The project she had worked so hard to complete was like the taste of ashes in her mouth. Perhaps I’m a biological freak, she thought giddily, and swept her arms open and addressed the question to the watchful waiting laboratory. Are my needs excessive, are they base and ignoble?
The cabinet in front of her clicked a non-committal reply and the pattern of lights changed sequence. She moved closer to the machine and pressed herself against its humming and vibrating body. The high-frequency oscillations jarred her pelvic bone and she pressed harder, holding the cabinet like an awkward lover, feeling its mechanical caress penetrate deep inside. She said, this time in a whisper, ‘Oh yes, I need you. I need somebody. Somebody please take me.’
She thought crazily, If a man walked in now, this minute, he could have me. I would offer myself. Anybody, any man, no matter who it was, would do.
And again she said aloud, holding the machine tightly, ‘I want Queghan to walk in and take me. I’d say to him, “Please take me. What I need is a damn good fuck and I want you to do it to me. Do it to me. Oh shit, do it, do it, please …”’
She tasted salt on her lips and realized that she was crying. She was wet elsewhere.
Well now. Professor deGrenier. This is not the kind of behaviour becoming to a scientist and a lady. And then she thought, This silly stupid female business acting up again. Why do women have to cry? What do men do in place of crying? Are they as tough and hard and controlled as they seem or is it all show, mere masculine display? In place of crying they must do something.
She looked at her watch. It was one-forty. Without another thought and with single-minded intent she returned to the office and pressed the code that would connect her directly with his private line.
*
When Queghan saw his wife again she scrutinized him closely and said: ‘How many this time?’
‘Is it beginning to make a difference?’
‘It’s very upsetting for a woman to have a husband who looks younger than she does,’ Oria said. ‘It sets people talking. Every time you come back from Tempus I expect to see you looking like Dorian Gray.’
‘Remember what happened to him.’
‘Well, how many?’
Queghan thought for a moment. ‘Ten.’
‘You’re sure it’s not more?’
‘How long was I away?’
‘Nearly three months.’
‘That’s near enough then.’ Queghan counted on his fingers. ‘I spent one week on Tempus, which coincides roughly with Earth IVn time; add a week for travel through the Field. So I aged two weeks in real-time while three months passed by here. Two weeks from twelve is ten.’
Oria still wasn’t happy. ‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if wives were permitted to take a trip through the E.M.I. Field? That way we could keep up with our husbands. As it is, we’re going in opposite directions – I’m heading for the grave while you’re regressing to the cradle.’
‘I’m two years older than you to begin with,’ Queghan pointed out.
‘You were two years older. According to my reckoning we’re now about the same age, and it isn’t doing my morale any good.’
Queghan laughed. ‘You always make the mistake of assuming that I’m getting younger – I’m simply ageing more slowly than you are. Time dilation in the E.M.I. Field* doesn’t reverse the ageing process, it slows it down by a variable factor depending on the velocity of the traveller relative to light-speed.’
‘So when I’m sixty-five you’ll be celebrating your fiftieth birthday. “Who’s that with you?” they’ll ask you. “Your mother?”’
‘Don’t worry about it. As an extra-special birthday treat I’ll arrange a long trip for you – a month or so in the Field – and when you get back we’ll be the same age. You might even be younger.’
‘But I’ll be away all those years waiting for you to catch me up!’ Oria wailed.
‘No,’ Queghan said patiently. ‘You’ll be away just one month on your time-scale. It’s me that’s going to have to wait for you. A month in the field is …’ he did a quick rough calculation ‘ … approximately nine years. But to achieve that you’ll have to spend a month in hyper-suspension at a fraction below light-speed.’
Oria meditated on this. She said suspiciously, ‘Does that mean you’re going to be left on your own for nine years while I’m shuttling about in spacetime somewhere?’
‘ ’Fraid so,’ Queghan said, poker-faced. ‘There isn’t any other way it can be done.’
Oria went and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘That’s a tough decision. To lose nine years in age or to have my husband running around loose for all that time. I can’t win either way,’ she told her reflection. ‘If I don’t take the trip some young bright-eyed girl will come along and snatch him away from the aged hag he’s living with, and if I do go into the Field he’ll be fancy-free for nine years.’
‘Would you like to be left alone while you decide?’ Queghan inquired solicitously.
‘You might think it funny,’ Oria said, turning from the mirror.
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘What’s that expression on your face?’
Queghan beckoned and she came to him. ‘What have you been doing while I’ve been away?’
‘Getting steadily older.’
‘If you go on like this it’ll become an obsession.’
‘It is an obsession. If you must know I’ve hardly been out of the house. Run off my feet most of the time. Slaving over a hot stove. Hardly a minute to call my own.’
‘I thought we’d moved on from the D. H. Lawrence phase?’
‘We have. I’m into mid-Twentieth America now.’
‘You’ll have to change your vocabulary. Americans in the mid-Twentieth didn’t, I’m quite sure, use the phrase “Slaving over a hot stove”.’
‘What phrases would they have used? I haven’t got round to researching the semantics of the period. Would they have said “Run off my feet”?’
‘It doesn’t sound right somehow. Their talk was much more clipped, epigrammatic. Remember the film we viewed in Archives? What was that line – “I’ll love you, baby, till hell freezes over”.’
Oria said, ‘I can’t go round saying that. Who would I say it to? Are there no other lines you remember?’
‘Mm,’ Queghan said after a moment. ‘How about this: “Here’s looking at you, kid”?’
‘“Here’s looking at your kid”?’ Oria repeated, staring at him. ‘What does it mean?’
‘I was trying to do the accent. The line is: “Here’s looking at you, kid”.’
Oria said this several times but still didn’t understand it. ‘I like the sound of it but what does it mean?’
‘It means … well I suppose it means …’ Queghan rubbed his nose. ‘Does it really matter? If it sounds all right why not use it?’
Oria looked doubtful. ‘I’d better check on it first; I want to use it in context.’
‘How’s the rest of the research coming along?’
‘I used the cyberthetic system at MyTT while you were away. It saves a lot of time – it gave me a complete dossier on the life profile: fashion, furniture, transportation, social mores—’
‘But not speech patterns.’
‘I never asked about that.’
‘You should study the newstapes in Archives,’ Queghan recommended. ‘You’ll be able to see how the people actually looked and behaved and spoke. Have you chosen a decade?’
‘The ’Fifties. It was just after their Second World War and everything was changing rapidly. It’s an interesting period.’
‘Which is how you came to know about the first atomic bomb,’ Queghan said.
Oria seemed suddenly preoccupied. She had drifted away, as she did on occasion without warning. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said, her face clouded.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding, and then: ‘There was something in the dossier that didn’t make sense. At least I couldn’t understand it.’
‘What was it?’
‘I asked the cyberthetic system for items of interior decoration to make the reconstruction authentic. Amongst them was a list of popular household plants: daffodils, roses, tulips, something called chrysanthemums, rubber plants, and so on, and right at the end, deadly black nightshade.’
Queghan didn’t say anything. He was breathing lightly and evenly.
‘I couldn’t understand it so I looked up the classification in the encyclopaedia. The botanical description of nightshade is Solanum nigrum. It’s also known as morel.’ Oria sighed. ‘It didn’t make sense even then.’
‘I don’t suppose it would.’
He had waited patiently and was now rewarded. There it was, large as life: the third coincidence.
*
Queghan reported to the Director on his visit to the Tempus Control Laboratory. Karve was amused at Max Herff’s reaction to the proposal that the search for the elusive anti-particles should take place at an average mean temperature of one thousand billion degrees. He bit on the stem of his pipe, shaking his head and chuckling to himself.
‘He really looked as if he was about to cry,’ said Queghan, standing at the angled window on Level 40. The campus below looked fresh and green in the clear morning light.
‘What do you estimate their chances to be?’
‘I wouldn’t have said high.’
‘Neither would I. But I have every confidence in Max; he might not welcome you with open arms the next time you meet but he’ll do his best with CENTiNEL.’
Queghan looked at the Director. ‘Let’s be honest, Johann, we’re dealing with a range of sub-atomic particles we know very little about, and when we start talking about anti-matter and minus time we’re like infants trying to grapple with Einstein’s Unified Field equations.’ It struck him, and not for the first time, that Karve was not too dissimilar in appearance to Einstein: the same flowing grey hair, broad Semitic nose and deep-sunk eyes – he even smoked a long-stemmed pipe as the father of Pre-Colonization physics had done – though Karve lacked a straggling moustache to complete the image. ‘If you want an opinion I’d say that the law of probability will have a lot to do with their chances of success. They might find the anti-particle equivalents in six months, ten years, or it could be tomorrow—’
‘And then we face the real question: what do we do with the data once we have it.’
‘That’s what none of the CENTiNEL team bothered to ask,’ Queghan said. ‘They were interested, it was obviously a challenge, I could see it in their eyes, but what happens if we find that a genus of sub-atomic particles is meddling with spacetime and affecting organic structure? We can’t understand them, we can’t communicate with them, we don’t know what their purpose is. They’re probably totally oblivious to our presence. So far as they’re concerned we could be a bizarre and not particularly interesting astro-biological specimen, a smear culture on a laboratory slide that’s hardly worth a passing glance. What they choose to do with the fabric of spacetime and the structure of matter is in their own interest and doesn’t concern us; we happen to be in the position of an unfortunate bystander caught up in the process. Tough shit for the human race.’
After a moment’s rumination Karve said, ‘But it doesn’t follow that we’re powerless. We have CENTiNEL and we also have control, to a limited degree, of a Temporal Flux Centre. These are not inconsiderable technological achievements.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Queghan said, not convinced.
‘And we also have your gift for mythic projection.’
‘Is that significant?’
‘Don’t you think so?’
‘I don’t know.’ Queghan came away from the window and sat down in the ergonomic chair. ‘How exactly?’
‘If our assumptions are correct and the anti-particles are in fact disrupting spacetime, what are the ways in which th
is will become apparent to us? They won’t only affect time present, the here and now, but also the past and the future.’
‘They could affect the past?’
‘Most certainly. The law of causality isn’t sacrosanct. Do you suppose anti-matter is any respecter of our neat and tidy earthbound rules? If it affects time it will affect all time, and with it causality. Cause and effect is a direct corollary of spacetime. Therefore if spacetime is being disrupted it follows that cause and effect will get a pretty rough ride too. There will be … inconsistencies.’
Queghan mulled this over. He envied Karve’s powers of didactic reasoning. He said eventually, ‘So somewhere in the past we should come across events – happenings? – which have been altered in some way. They will go against recorded history as we know it.’
‘To be honest I don’t really know, Chris. I’m simply taking the data as supplied by CENTiNEL and interpolating a series of possible consequences.’
He looked at Queghan for a long moment and then from a drawer took a file sheathed in green vinyl. He said casually:
‘Did you know that the Germans were the first to develop the atomic bomb? They made and tested a prototype by the autumn of 1943 Pre-Colonization.’
Queghan was surprised and intrigued. ‘No, I never knew that.’
‘Neither did I,’ Karve said, smiling. He extracted the file from its sheath and opened it. ‘How’s this for an interesting and little-known fact: the British Blackshirts were voted into office on the 30th October, 1938, with Gerard Mandrake as Prime Minister.’
‘Do you mean the Fascist party?’
Karve nodded and turned a page. ‘Surprising how ignorant we are of Pre-Colonization history,’ he remarked lightly. ‘How about this: Germany invaded Poland on the 9th May, 1939, and three days later Great Britain launched a sea- and airborne invasion of France which met with only token resistance. Within three weeks, by the 3rd June, France and her dependencies were occupied territory under the sovereign rule of Great Britain. The French Government capitulated and all power was vested in the Acting Consular-General, Sir Richard Brock-Tregenna.’