Johann Karve had spent a restless night. As a rule he slept soundly, untroubled by whatever cares the day had heaped upon his ageing shoulders; but the latest results from the CENTiNEL Particle Accelerator had been more than merely disturbing, they had been alarming.
He sat at his desk on Level 40 of MyTT drinking lukewarm tea from a china cup, turning the pages of research data: column after column of nine-digit numbers which varied only by the last two, in some cases the last three, decimal places. These were the reassuring ones. But here and there amongst the endless rows of grey figures a red asterisk shrilled a warning like a beacon on a foggy night. His first and natural conclusion, after observing these maverick numbers, had been ‘cyberthetic malfunction’. It was the obvious explanation, the calming shot which numbed the shock to the sensory nerve system and intellectual processes. Or failing that explanation (and it had died a miserable death on reading the addendum to the report which stated that the data had been independently verified) one could always suppose that the Particle Accelerator itself had detected a freak interaction of mu-meson particles in the region of the Temporal Flux Centre 2U0525-06. After all, it was an unusual region of spacetime where time dilation was at optimum.
Yet even this would not do. As Director of the Myth Technology Research Institute he had to rely on the expertise of hardline scientists, but he was not such a fool that he couldn’t read a particle accelerator report and interpret the findings in a meaningful fashion. The decay rate of mu-mesons was precisely calibrated: cyberthetic analysis had already allowed for the fact that they lived seven times longer than was theoretically possible. Created by the collision between energetic protons emanating from super-nova explosions elsewhere in the galaxy, their very high speeds – a fraction below lightspeed – enabled them to age slower than other particles in the same spatio-temporal co-ordinate.
And not only were the mu-mesons behaving strangely. The really worrying aspect was that a whole range of elementary psi particles, companions of the neutron and proton, denoted Σ, Λ, Ξ and so on, had suddenly taken it into their heads to alter their rates of decay. If time dilation wasn’t the culprit this left only one possibility, but it was the one Karve was reluctant to accept.
In simple terms it meant that the fabric of spacetime was disintegrating.
The atomic structure of elementary particles, which constituted the stuff of energy and matter, was behaving erratically and breaking all the rules of physics. The figures in front of him were evidence of this – these ordered grey columns which foretold that organic structure, and time itself, were breaking down. There would be no cataclysmic explosion, no supra-galactic event to signal the end of time – merely the creeping infinitesimal process of disintegration and decay.
And how would this process announce itself? Karve picked up the china cup and supported it lightly by the outspread tips of his fingers. Inside this ‘dead’ piece of matter a thousand billion billion particles were busily humming away in their orbits: atoms within molecules; electrons, protons and neutrons within atoms; and within these sub-atomic particles the infinitely smaller constituent parts which were the wave-forms of pure energy. Nothing very dramatic was required to make this whole elaborate structure crumble into nothingness, to dissipate itself in a burst of radiation. True, the amount of radiation generated would be enough to devastate an area several kilometres square, but essentially the atomic structure would simply have to break the rules and stop behaving as it had done since the formation of the primeval atom all those thousands of millions of years ago.
Then – nothing.
The cup would cease to exist. The atomic structure which obligingly kept to the shape of a cup for the purpose of drinking tea would quite arbitrarily decide to take on some other formation, or perhaps not to assume a definite pattern at all. Chaos would rule. Particles would interact at random in a formless plasma of non-matter. Or perhaps entropy would come, once and for evermore, to hold the universe in a state of lukewarm apathy. The ultimate heat death in which everything stayed where it was because it couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere else. In the absence of matter and energy interchange, communication would cease. Lightspeed would become a meaningless and futile concept. Spacetime would be defunct. And without these universal ground rules time itself would stop. Dead.
Karve believed intellectually in the probability, if not the actual possibility, of these thoughts; he was too much the scientist to refute them and turn his face away in blind obstinacy. Intellectually yes, they could happen, but emotionally his own senses rebelled against the dogma of clinical scientific objectivity. The feel of the cup touching his fingertips could not be measured by any device known to man. The sense of well-being he experienced from the broad shaft of sunlight warming his hand, and the memories it evoked of other sunfilled days, could not be contained in a scientific treatise or marked by the indices on a Gaussian curve. Even looking out, as he did each day, from the apex of the pyramid, imbued his whole being with the inexpressible wonder of vibrant life so that the entire body of human knowledge lay in its shadow. The fact of existence, the mystery of creation, were still the abiding and elemental truths.
The sheets of figures, the innumerable grey columns, called him back to duty. He was an old man, his days of innovation and creativity long past. His brain was now the repository of a million facts, a human card index lacking the spark of synthesis which was the basis of scientific inquiry.
Only connect, he thought. The answer was that simple.
His First Assistant came through on audio. Karve listened patiently but yet with a trace of weariness to some meandering second-hand complaint from RECONPAN. It had been filed by deGrenier, who had insisted on a personal interview with the Director.
‘I would have thought,’ Karve told his First Assistant, ‘that Systems Engineering or perhaps Archives could have settled this to everyone’s satisfaction.’ The two areas he most dreaded becoming involved with, and this particular problem combined them: hardware and administration.
‘DeGrenier has taken the matter up with both sections, sir, and neither can offer an adequate explanation.’ The First Assistant paused, and then like a mother hoping to reason with a recalcitrant child: ‘I think under the circumstances it might be wise …’
Karve pushed the CENTiNEL report to one side. ‘Send deGrenier in,’ he said, and while he waited studied the china cup and saucer on the desk as if expecting them to dematerialize before his eyes.
DeGrenier was brisk, businesslike and to the point.
‘I’m sorry to take up your time, Director, but somebody has been tampering with the information retrieval system. Yesterday I requested biographical details to build up a Subject Profile and this is what came up.’
Karve took the yellow print-out, comprising several sheets folded concertina fashion. He read:
RATE OF DECAY AS PER UPDATED CENTiNEL REPORT (REF 29-1493b/0012) IN ACCORDANCE WITH MASTER FILE (HEAD QUARK/SUB ANTI/SUB CHARM/SUB STRANGE) WITH THE FOLLOWING ADDITIONS, DELETIONS AND AMENDMENTS:
Then followed row upon row of symbols and figures, several thousand of them neatly tabulated in blocks of electric type.
‘I take it that these aren’t the biographical details you were after,’ Karve said dryly, glancing up at deGrenier.
‘No, they are not. May I sit down?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Karve said. ‘Please. How rude of me. Would you care for some tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ deGrenier said stiffly.
These hardliners, Karve thought. Nothing must stand in their way. A screw strips its thread and they have a nervous breakdown. Though that wasn’t entirely fair, he chided himself; deGrenier was a gifted and dedicated scientist who virtually single-handed had developed the RECONPAN project from a feasibility study to the point where it was a practical research technique. It wouldn’t be too long before operational trials were under way. The Director had never been absolutely sure how RECONPAN functioned or what its specific purpose was supposed to be. No doubt it would be useful for something.
‘This kind of thing is most disruptive,’ deGrenier said portentously. ‘We’re already behind schedule and to have some fool tampering with vital information …’
Karve smiled in his gentle myopic way. This image of bumbling academic was a subterfuge he had brought to a fine level of accomplishment. ‘Are you suggesting that someone is deliberately falsifying information?’ he said, his tangled grey eyebrows forming a line of undergrowth above his polarized bifocals.
‘Well, perhaps not deliberately,’ deGrenier amended.
‘You used the word “tampering” which implies an act of wilful malpractice. Or a practical joke.’
‘I take a dim view of practical jokes.’
‘It seems to me that either it’s a system malfunction or human error. I shall have to find out who or what is responsible. I’m sorry if your work has been impaired in any way.’ He smiled his gentle lingering smile.
‘I had to wait hours for that information and when it arrived it was worse than useless. Pages of meaningless figures.’
‘Meaningless?’ the Director said. ‘Not to someone working in the field of study relating to quarks. There are other projects here in addition to RECONPAN.’
It was the nearest Karve could bring himself to an outright rebuke. As deGrenier stood up he said: ‘Whose biographical details were you seeking?’ And holding the print-out aloft: ‘In place of this meaningless jumble?’
‘Theodor Morell, German National, round about the period 1936 to 1945 Pre-Colonization.’
‘Not a name familiar to me.’
‘Rather unlikely unless you’d made a special study of the mid-Twentieth, in particular the Second World War. Morell was a top Nazi physician. Not a great deal is known about him and I was hoping to fill in the background. Instead I received the life history and mating habits of the mythical quark.’
It was the first time he had known deGrenier make a remark that was intended to be humorous. His curiosity was aroused. He said, ‘Was Morell qualified? I mean, was he a good doctor?’
‘The evidence so far, what little we have, would suggest not,’ deGrenier said, pausing by the door. ‘He sometimes used drugs without knowing what effect they would have, experimenting on his patients and giving massive overdoses.’
‘I see.’ Karve was looking over his bifocals at deGrenier’s legs. They were rather nice legs. The scientist seemed unaware of this flattering scrutiny, though she might not have considered it all that flattering, coming from the Director of the Institute, a man more than twice her age.
‘So it would be fair to describe him as a quack.’
‘I suppose so,’ deGrenier said indifferently.
‘That might explain one or two things.’
‘Might it?’
Karve nodded slowly and dropped the print-out on the desk. ‘I’ll see that this finds its rightful owner.’
‘Thank you, Director.’ Her face had relaxed into a tentative smile. It was quite rare for Pouline deGrenier. She went out.
Yet another reason for being alive, Karve thought, the pleasure a beautiful woman could bestow simply by her presence. It wasn’t healthy for a man of his age to have such notions. The desire would be awakened but not appeased, and his casual appraisal of her legs might have led to other fanciful flights of imagination which old men were supposed to have outgrown – as if advancing years killed the urge completely. They did not, of course, merely the opportunity.
Karve reached out to take the cup from its saucer and as he did so the handle came away and the cup smashed itself into dozens of tiny fragments, too many and too small to count.
*
Queghan waited philosophically for the third coincidence.
He was not by nature a patient man but he had taught himself to curb his restlessness, knowing that the harder he sought the third coincidence the further it would recede. The only way to snare it was by allowing it to catch him.
The print-out arrived in his room on Level 17 with a note attached, which read: ‘Gremlins at work again. Or would it be more accurate to say a quirk in the system?’ and it was signed ‘Johann’.
Karve had evidently made the right connection. But as one of the founders of the metaphysical science known as Myth Technology his working hypothesis for life was based on the principle of acausal relationships. No two events were necessarily connected in direct sequence, though the connection was there if you knew how and where to look. In his book The Hidden Universe Karve had referred to these connections as ‘the leys’ – intangible filaments of meaning which held everything together: man, matter, energy, space, time.
Queghan detached the note and underneath it was the triangular stamp with which each Section identified the material in its possession. Inside the triangle the word RECONPAN followed by the initials ‘P. deG’ and the date of receipt.
Why had Pouline deGrenier received the information pertaining to HEAD QUARK/SUB ANTI/SUB CHARM/SUB STRANGE? Was it that the cyberthetic system had got its wires crossed? But the system was supposedly proof against errors of that kind, self-programmed to detect and rectify them.
Now supposing, Queghan thought, indulging in his favourite pastime, supposing the information relating to the quarks was in some way pertinent to the RECONPAN project but that Pouline deGrenier had failed to make the connection. It would possibly mean that the cyberthetic system (or something guiding the system) was pointing them in the direction they didn’t realize was the correct one – rather like a guide dog leading a blind man away from a precipice he doesn’t know is there.
Supposing, too, that the same applied in his case. He had asked for information on the decay rate of quarks and been offered instead a fictional character called Charles Bovary and an obscure doctor who had something to do with the Hitler movement on Old Earth.
And supposing he was just chasing rainbows. Maybe a micro-circuit had flipped its lid and everyone in the building was receiving cuckoo information. Some suppositions, unfortunately, had the leaden ring of cracked bells.
Queghan pressed the ALERT tab on the input terminal and sat back as the lights started to blink and the machine hummed to itself. He had a love-hate relationship with the cyberthetic box of tricks, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to know it felt the same; they were old sparring partners.
After several moments had elapsed the system said: Can I be of service? Evidently tired of waiting.
‘I’m perplexed.’
The human condition, so I’m told.
‘I can do without the homespun philosophy.’
I’ve just been oiled.
‘And the cyberthetic wit.’
Sorry. Do you need me or are you just passing the time of day?
‘How’s your memory of the Second World War Pre-Colonization?’ Queghan asked.
There was a slight, though significant, pause.
Comprehensive.
‘It isn’t on your mind? I mean obsessively.’
I’m not programmed for obsessions.
‘Aren’t you the lucky one.’
That’s a matter of opinion.
‘You gave me some incorrect information yesterday, Cyb.’
Not possible. If it was incorrect there must have been an error at the input terminal. I have registered no malfunction in the past twenty-four hours.
‘That’s your discreet cyberthetic way of saying that I punched in the wrong question.’
I am stating a fact No malfunction occurred.
Queghan took out a pack of Nexus-T. He extracted one of the coloured plastic tubes and inhaled deeply. His senses seemed to vibrate in the fumes. He said:
‘What do you know about RECONPAN?’
Had the cyberthetic system been programmed to sigh it might have done so. A lot, it said.
‘Is it classified?’
Yes. Do you require the security reference?
Queghan released purple fumes into the still air. They ascended to the ceiling in a hazy spiral. As a mythographer he had clearance on all projects within MyTT, classified or not. The system was humouring him. He let a few seconds go by, just to show which of them was the human being.
‘Do you find Pouline deGrenier attractive?’ he said at last.
I know what attractiveness means but I don’t comprehend it. You mustn’t play semantic games with me, Queghan, it isn’t fair.
‘You’ve been playing games with me.’
Not true, the cyberthetic system protested. It sounded almost hurt. A machine with offended feelings.
Queghan said, ‘Is RECONPAN anywhere near operational?’
One moment. The system went away and delved into the depths of its billionfold cellular memory. There was a muted beep and then: Experimental trials are scheduled but they are having difficulty with the tissue cultures which are not retaining the neurons as expected. Reconstruction of the Subject’s memory file is as per classification in—
‘Never mind the classification. As I recall, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, RECONPAN is the reconstruction of a human brainpan.’
Correct.
‘How is this achieved?’
By complete analysis and correlation of all material in Archives; everything written or known or recorded about the Subject – letters, books, speeches, newstapes, sound recordings, contemporary accounts and documents – every known fact is processed and a neurological simulation of the Subject’s brainpan is constructed in the laboratory. The current difficulty is due to Psycho-Med being unable to stimulate self-generation of tissue cultures.
‘Explain.’
The brain functions but is not technically alive. In order to achieve operational capability the tissue cultures must be capable of generating and transmitting neurochemical data.
‘And they haven’t managed to do this.’
No.
Queghan took the fumes into his lungs and the room seemed to shimmer as the drug distorted the parallax of reality.
‘Have they chosen the Subject for the experimental trials?’
Yes.
‘Who is it?’
Adolf Schicklgruber by birth, later known as Adolf Hitler. German National, early Twentieth Pre-Colonization. Austrian by birth, became German Chancellor in—
‘Thank you, Cyb,’ Queghan interrupted gently. ‘I do know who Adolf Hitler was.’
*
If there was any dissension at MyTT it usually revolved round Johann Karve’s original dictum that the proper field of study was the interpretation of past and future myths. This statement of the Institute’s primary aim had sparked off a continuing debate which occasionally flared into open confrontation.
Karve proposed that myths and legends were repositories of knowledge – ‘centres of human consciousness in which we find certain intuitive and elemental truths’ in his phrase. As a useful analogy he often compared them to the eye of a hurricane, the dead-still centre of a vortex where nothing takes place but around which a mad whirl of activity is going on. ‘Imagine time as a vortex,’ he said in his lectures, ‘rushing around in a frenzy of apparently meaningless and random interactions. Time is composed of events, in our case events on a human scale which mark off the passing years, and now and then these events coagulate at a particular spatio-temporal co-ordinate. This is what we call a myth. Now if we can analyse myths and interpret them correctly we shall gain an insight into the underlying meaning and purpose of the Metagalaxy – an eye into the elemental nature of time.’
Those on the mystical or metaphysical side of the Two Disciplines could accept this readily enough, but for those on the other, more concerned with the practical development and application of advanced technology, these were concepts not easily grasped or gratefully received.
As a hardline scientist working in Myth Technology Pouline deGrenier tried to embrace, somewhat awkwardly, the two extremes. It was a contradiction she was not unaware of. In private conversation with Léon Steele, her Third Assistant, she sometimes referred to her ‘schizophrenic position’ in the Institute, of being neither fish nor fowl.
Steele was a young man of nervous disposition. He had once thought himself to be (perhaps he still was) in love with Pouline deGrenier. He had assisted her on the RECONPAN project for over a year and their relationship had been cordial until the sweating grunting struggle had taken place in a dusty subsection of Archives (HEAD WAR/SUB PRE-COL/SUB WORLD II) and his ardour had gone off the boil. Since then he had tried, with a fair measure of success, to play the role of the intense, dedicated professional researcher.
The trouble with this was that he found her physically unbearable to be near without being able to touch: his calm and rational self told him not to be such a fool while the rest of him lusted after her like a child in front of a confectionery display. Though he still insisted to himself that he was definitely, emphatically, categorically not in love with her.
This didn’t prevent him from offering her a few minutes of rather fawning sympathy: ‘The Director is out of touch,’ he agreed. ‘What else can you expect of an old man?’
‘The establishment is going downhill. How can we get on with our work if the systems we rely on, and in particular the information retrieval circuit, are not functioning properly? He smiled. The man actually smiled as though the problem was unimportant. It wouldn’t surprise me – it really wouldn’t surprise me if he doesn’t know what the RECONPAN project is all about. You’re right, he’s too old; out of touch …’
That cold briskness in her voice, she hated it. It sounded in her ears like the voice of someone she wouldn’t wish to know. It had an unpleasant grating quality, lacking all trace of emotion.
Léon had the annoying habit of pulling at his finger joints whenever he was listening to anyone, and now he nodded his head sympathetically to the accompaniment of clicking bone.
‘Please don’t do that. It goes right through me.’
‘What?’ Léon said, startled.
‘Whatever it is you do with your fingers.’
Léon looked down at his empty hands, frowning.
‘Come along, we’re wasting time.’
‘Oh yes,’ Léon said. He suddenly remembered: ‘Miss Ritblat in Psycho-Med has been trying to reach you.’ He faltered. ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you before.’
Pouline deGrenier never liked speaking to Karla Ritblat, head of the Psycho-Med Faculty, though she had little choice in the matter. The other woman was rigid to the point of being cyberthetic, straight-backed and thin-lipped with a helmet of silver hair: it was Pouline deGrenier thirty years hence – or how she feared she might become if some man didn’t come along and claim her. She had her career sure enough, and it was fulfilling, but the essential core of her life seemed to be dribbling inconsequentially away. She felt herself to be in shadow, on the edge of a bright light, never at the true centre of things.
‘I think we’re making progress.’ Karla Ritblat said when they had made contact. Neither woman bothered with the viewing panel. ‘The cultures are responding to cobalt-7 radiation: we’ve only tried it in short low-intensity bursts for fear of causing damage to the DNA structure. But the results so far are promising.’
‘How soon will you know if the cultures are able to accept neurochemical data?’
‘We mustn’t run before we can walk,’ said Karla Ritblat. A gentle admonishment from the headmistress to the pupil teacher. Pouline felt herself flushing. She breathed evenly and said:
‘I shall require a time-scale projection for the next three months to co-ordinate your efforts with ours. The Subject Profile is almost completed.’
‘You’ll need a lot of information to fill one hundred billion neuron cells.’
‘I think we have enough,’ Pouline deGrenier responded crisply. ‘Everything now depends on the tissue cultures, if and when they’re available.’ That was one in the eye for Karla Ritblat.
She broke contact to forestall any further allusive comment and became aware that someone was standing at the door to the office. She took in several confused impressions all at once: slender height, the peculiar rake of the shoulders, a lean gaunt face heavily creased near the nostrils and mouth, white hair cropped short. It was the mythographer Queghan, whom she knew by reputation but had never spoken to or seen at such close quarters.
Her body chemistry was upset: part fear, part fascination.
‘I passed your assistant on the way in. He said it would be all right. If you’re busy—’
‘No. Of course. Come in. Sit down.’ (Why, Pouline wondered, was she speaking so idiotically, like somebody with a wooden jaw?)
She was thankful when he sat down; his height had been forbidding. He introduced himself, adding that he worked as a mythographer on Level 17. She was thinking furiously what possible reason he could have for coming to see her, and at the same time taking in his strange appearance. She noticed his hands in particular and saw that the nails were pale elongated ovals, almost transparent. She thought, An odd fish.
He began: ‘I don’t know too much about the RECONPAN project beyond a potted briefing from the cyberthetic system, but yesterday rather a curious thing happened. Your Section and mine were juxtaposed at a certain world point.’
‘How interesting,’ Pouline said tamely. ‘At least it would be if I knew what that meant.’
‘Forgive me, I have this nasty habit of using jargon. I meant there was a coincidence involving our two Sections; some information which went astray.’
‘Ah yes,’ Pouline said, none too kindly. ‘So you were the one. There was indeed a mix-up on the information retrieval circuit – either that or somebody had been tampering with the cyberthetic system.’ There was a veiled accusation there somewhere.
‘Possibly.’ He hadn’t spotted the inference or else had chosen to ignore it.
‘What else could it be?’
Queghan held up his hand and ticked the points off on his long fingers. ‘One: the system reported no malfunction within the past twenty-four hours. Two: neither of us received the information we had requested. Three: on the same day you asked for information on Theodor Morell there was a keyboard error and up came Morell’s name on the print-out. The odds against that happening by accident are several billion to one. I haven’t computed the exact ratio.’
Pouline shook her head, slightly baffled. ‘All that went wrong, surely, is that I received your information and you received mine. Isn’t that what happened?’
‘No, it isn’t. I never asked for the information you received. By mistake I punched in the word “quack” instead of “quark”, a one-letter substitution, and the system came up with the nearest approximation to “a charming quack”. But then you received information on the decay rate of quarks which, it so happened, I hadn’t asked for.’
By now Pouline was totally lost. She nodded slowly, trying to make sense of it and thinking what a strange colour Queghan’s eyes were, neither brown nor blue or—
‘And there could be another mystery.’
‘Which is?’
‘What became of your information? I’m assuming you asked for details of Morell. But you didn’t receive them and neither did I.’
‘I asked for biographical details to build up a Subject Profile, that’s true. But if there wasn’t an interchange of information how would you know that? Did the Director mention it?’
Queghan smiled suddenly and quite charmingly: it came as a surprise that his austere face was capable of such mercurial change. ‘It was the only illogical explanation.’
‘Do you base all your assumptions on illogical premises?’ she asked. It annoyed her that he seemed to be enjoying a private joke at her expense.
‘I thrive on them,’ he said, still smiling.
‘It doesn’t get us very far.’
Queghan conceded the truth of this. ‘If we could discover what happened to the Morell biography it might give us a clue.’
‘I don’t have time to indulge in detective stories.’
‘Or perhaps it was deliberately suppressed.’
It was Pouline’s turn to smile, though it was more cynical than amused. ‘By the cyberthetic system?’
‘That had occurred to me as a possibility. But as you know the system is self-programmed to prevent incorrect or misleading information coming into circulation. I don’t think the system is at fault.’
It wasn’t, Pouline realized, only his physical appearance which disturbed her. There was something else. She realized with a swift disquieting shock what it was: he was able to see into her mind. It was as though she was naked in front of him, an affront to the senses that made a cold creeping sickness reach up and envelop her, the taste of iron in her mouth. With an effort of will she said:
‘I fail to see the point of this. Some information has gone astray. It isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.’
‘Aren’t you curious? And what about the information you received – that wasn’t even requested?’
‘I can’t explain it.’
‘Neither can I and it worries me. Or I should say that I can think of an explanation but I don’t understand it.’ He laced his fingers together and sat staring at her. Pouline shifted uncomfortably; it was hateful to be scrutinized like this.
Queghan said presently, ‘Supposing there is a connection between the RECONPAN project and my investigation of quark and anti-quark particles.’
‘Not possible,’ Pouline said shortly.
‘There is a theory,’ he went on, ‘that alongside our own universe, existing side by side with it, there is a universe made up of anti-quarks. An anti-quark universe. It could be here with us now, at this moment in time, occupying the same spatio-temporal co-ordinate – the only difference being that its basic subatomic constituents are anti-quarks existing in minus time.’
‘Then we should be able to detect it,’ Pouline deGrenier said, ever the pragmatic hardliner.
‘Perhaps we can. We can’t detect it with our scientific instruments because they can only operate in our own universe. But imagine for a moment that in place of eyes and ears human beings were equipped with X-ray and infra-red sensory equipment. We should see a different kind of universe altogether. The sea and sky would no longer be blue. Solid objects would appear to be transparent. We should be able to hear the stars. We can only picture the universe as it appears to our own limited senses.’
‘I know all this,’ Pouline deGrenier said icily. ‘I did a two-year postgraduate course in electromagnetic wave theory.’
‘Then you should have no difficulty grasping the concept of an anti-quark universe existing alongside our own.’
‘We have no proof that it does.’
‘We have no proof that it doesn’t.’
‘Very well. Let’s say I accept the possibility of what you say. Where does it take us?’
‘To the consideration of another possibility: that some unspecified agency has engineered all this.’
‘Engineered?’
‘The clues have been laid – unless, that is, we’re too blind to see them. Something is operating in a stratum of spacetime which normally would be invisible to our senses. Deliberately or accidentally, I don’t know which, it has made its presence known to us.’
Pouline gazed at him. Her features had hardened into a frown. She said, ‘What has any of this to do with RECONPAN? Or with Morell? It’s sheer nonsense. The project is solely concerned with neurochemical reconstruction of brain cells, with the simulation of the Subject’s brain.’
‘That’s right,’ Queghan said. ‘And we shouldn’t forget the Subject you’ve chosen for experimental trials.’
Pouline looked into those peculiar eyes of his, transfixed by his gaze, and the silence hung in the air between them.