Seeking the Mythical Future (25 page)

10
‘There Shall Be Time No Longer'

Black reached forward awkwardly and closed the folder which lay on the trestle-table. The exertion made him grunt and pant, as a mangy dog struggling on the end of a chain. The heat in the room was at the point of being unbearable; it was only made tolerable by the knowledge that one could not escape it; it filled this ghastly continent from ocean to ocean, a dense humid blanket resting immovably on the flat desert scrubland.

He eased his position slightly. Mustn't overtax the old ticker, not in this heat. Two events had profoundly disturbed him, the second of which had compounded the first. The first event had been the arrival of the guard that morning to inform him of an unfortunate accident: the yellow shrivelled corpse of the King's Special Envoy had been discovered in one of the interrogation cells. It was clear (there was no other explanation) that he had been bitten by a King snake. ‘These things happen,' the guard had shrugged, while Black quickly remembered and composed his features to convey shock and disbelief with a vague suggestion of sorrow at the tragic occurrence.

‘Yes,' he had replied at last, ‘what a tremendous shame,' and then waited politely for the guard to complete the catalogue of horror. When he didn't, and was about to withdraw, Black rashly inquired after the other occupant of the cell. The guard said, ‘And who would that be, sir?' and Black said impetuously, ‘Surely he wasn't there alone, not at that time of night. He must have been
with
someone.' The guard shrugged again and made a gesture comprising two asymmetric shapes in the air. ‘We found only one corpse. His insignia identified him as an officer of the King's Commission. Should there have been someone else?'

And now there was the report, which Black assumed could only have been compiled some hours before the ‘tragic occurrence'. It had been waiting for him on the trestle-table, lying there accusingly like a mocking jibe from beyond the grave, demanding to be read. It had at first mystified him, even made him laugh (though laughing was difficult under the circumstances) and then – as the realization dawned – confirmed his own worst fears. The worst fear of all was that Q's crazy prediction would come to pass – and yet it hadn't, not yet. But what had happened to the body? Q had vanished, ceased to exist, become a phantom hovering uneasily on the edge of memory. That was the first unsettling event.

The second was the reading of the report, which seemed to be saying that Brenton and not Q had been ‘injected' into this world. If this were true it would at least explain how Q had managed to disappear from the cell: he had vanished because he had never been there in the first place. Instead Brenton had been the injectee (Brenton? Benson? Which was which?), and this being so it meant that everything Black experienced was a product of Brenton's (Benson's?) imagination.

But how ludicrous … he was letting this thing run away with him. He couldn't possibly depend on Benson/Brenton for his existence, not possibly. Brenton/Benson was dead. Dead. And he was alive. (He wished the girl wouldn't wriggle so.) To suppose that Benton/Brenson had imagined all this was to fall prey to the wildest imaginative leap of all. No, no, he would not accept it. Not when he had absolute proof (why wouldn't she keep still when he was trying to think?) that Bentson's/Brenon's dying had had not the slightest effect on the reality or otherwise of his own existence.

It might equally be proposed that he, Black, was responsible for this (ha-ha) future world of ‘Queghan' and his laughable ‘mythic projections'. Who was to say that one had the advantage over the other? Why, here, yes here, in the report – he wrenched the girl's head aside and reached over her shoulder to get at the folder – this Queghan fellow had voiced the doubt of his own reality, had mooted the possibility that he himself was the product of another consciousness. Yes, here it was, in black
and white:
Perhaps the two separate consciousnesses – the several, an infinite number of them – are at this moment involved in this same speculation, each aware of the possible existence of the others but unable to prove or refute their actual reality
.

Ha! There it was. So let the cogging swints or Benon/Breston or whoever affirm or deny
that
. He was as real as they were. This moaning girl bent before him across the trestle-table was the only proof required. A jerking slippery poke from the rear gave the lie to all this bladdering cod-laddle, immersing himself up to the point of total penetration and hearing the choking gulp as the force of impact knocked the breath from her lungs. With each long sucking stroke he was entering deeper and deeper, the exquisite thrill making his sweating flanks tremble: an unbearable ecstasy rising to the pitch of a scream. She was moaning, he was coming, and as it flooded from him the yellow sun disintegrated in his brain, the red ocean bubbled up inside his head, and the world dissolved before his eyes into deepest impenetrable black.

*

A
PPENDIX I
:
Time Dilation

Time dilation – the ‘stretching' or ‘slowing down' of time – is a consequence of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, published in 1905. The Theory states, as a broad concept, that there is no absolute standard of reference throughout the universe; every measurement of phenomena depends upon the conditions under which the
observer
observes, not upon any intrinsic or objective quality which the phenomena contain. All observable results depend on the position of the observer at a certain point in spacetime, and all interpretations are equally valid and correct. In simple terms, there is no ‘objective' reality which exists independent of an observer.

Another proposition of the Theory, which has been tested and verified, is that lightspeed, however it is measured and irrespective of source, remains constant at 300,000 kilometres per second. This would seem to defy common sense, for what it means is that if two beams of light are receding in opposite directions, we would assume the sum total of their speeds to be twice the speed of light, or 2c (where c = lightspeed). But this is not so. According to the formula

we find the answer to be c (the speed of light).

Similarly, if two spacecraft are receding from each other, both travelling at 90 per cent the speed of light, common sense would indicate that their combined speed of recession is 180 per cent the speed of light, but again this is not the case. Using the formula

(where a and b are the speeds of the two craft and c is the speed of light) we see that the total speed of their recession is
less
than the speed of light. In Earthbound terms this appears to be nonsense, but it is a fact which has been proven by various experiments and one that any space traveller will have to live with.

Two other effects are worth noting, concerning the mass of a moving body and its length. The faster a body travels, the more massive it becomes, compared to its mass at rest. As it approaches lightspeed the body increases in mass until at lightspeed itself the body is of infinite mass (and would require an engine of infinite power to push it forward). At the same time, the length of the object (a spacecraft, say)
decreases
as it approaches lightspeed. At lightspeed itself the spacecraft is of zero length, and for all practical purposes ceases to exist.

In order to measure time dilation on board a spacecraft – and everything will slow down, remember, including clocks and the ageing process of the astronaut – we multiply a given period (60 minutes Earthtime) by

to arrive at the following table. This has been calculated for a spacecraft which on Earth measures 100 yards in length and taking one Earth hour as the standard time interval. From this it can be seen how the various effects operate upon a spacecraft approaching the speed of light.

It should be noted that these effects upon a spacecraft approaching lightspeed are identical to those experienced by a body in a strong gravitational field. In fact, Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity, makes no distinction between the effects of speed and those of gravitation. A Vehicle in the vicinity
of a Temporal Flux Centre would, for all practical purposes, be approaching lightspeed, and thus be subject to the effects tabulated below.

A
PPENDIX II
:
Schwarzschild Radius (Rs)

In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild, one of the leading physicists of the time, calculated the effects a small, extremely massive body would have once it had passed below a certain critical radius – the Schwarzschild Radius (Rs). He found that it would distort spacetime so severely that nothing could ever escape its tremendous gravitational force.

Surrounding a body of this type would be the
event horizon
, so called because it is an absolute barrier to the outside universe, preventing any communication from inside the event horizon to the outside: not even light itself can escape.

To take a specific example, that of the Sun, how far would it have to contract before reaching the critical Schwarzschild Radius? The mathematics are as follows, where G is the gravitational constant, c is the velocity of light, and M a given mass: