Seeking the Mythical Future (6 page)

Q submitted passively to the fitting of the belt, not at all concerned by the clutter of equipment and the wires strung across the room. Black explained perfunctorily that it was a standard tebst and there was no need to worry: everybody had it done. Sarah folded back the bedclothes to reveal the pale translucent body, her eyes delicately avoiding that part of the patient's body which was an integral part of the experiment. Instead she busied herself with adjusting the belt and making sure the terminals were greased and properly connected.

Black switched on the galvanoscope and a faint crackling came from the battery and the acrid smell of chemicals, pungent to the nostrils. The needle on the dial flickered into life as the charge built up.

‘Response?' Black said. He was watching the dial.

‘Negative.' Sarah glanced swiftly at the patient and away again.

Black adjusted the controls and the needle rose steadily, the crackling sound becoming louder. A puff of blue smoke drifted from the battery. The patient's left foot twitched and the muscles in his arms went rigid; he made a noise in his throat and his eyeballs rolled upward.

‘Response?'

Sarah looked and saw that he was reacting. She thought: My God, is he reacting! Her chest expanded and it was as though she couldn't get enough air to enter her lungs. She felt most peculiar. Now she couldn't take her eyes off him, watching almost in a trance as the various parts of his body twitched and jerked and his mouth now clamped shut and now gaped in a dry gasp of pain. The erection quotient dragged her back to reality, making it plain that he was reaching the limit of tolerance.

‘Hold it there, that's enough, he's responding.'

‘Good,' Black said. ‘Excellent.' His eyes were alive. ‘It's damn well working! The damn thing is working!'

The patient's eyes were wide and blank, without pupils, and his jaw began to jerk mechanically. A babble of something came out, mingled with the foam on his lips, and then he began to talk, purging himself of all random, non-associative thoughts.

3
The Dream Tape

Of the one hundred thousand million stars in the Milky Way it had been estimated by statistical computation that upwards of eighty-three per cent possessed one or more planetary bodies of sufficient mass to enable them to retain an atmosphere. Many of these were extremely massive by Old Earth standards, and it was thought that their tremendous surface gravity would have subverted the conditions necessary for the creation of life: the basic carbon components could not have progressed beyond the most elementary stages of molecular manufacture and duplication. The number of system-containing planets with a suitable atmosphere for the creation of life at zero point in spacetime (ie: within a span of 10,000 years before and after the present moment) was close to 10
⁸
, or one hundred million. This meant that within the Milky Way galaxy there were 100,000,000 planets capable of supporting life – in however bizarre a form that might be.

Extending this hypothesis to the limits of the observable
Metagalaxy
(the Hubble Radius of 1.3 × 10
¹⁰
light-years, or 13,000 million light-years) there were an estimated 3,000,000,000 galaxies each containing an average of 100,000,000,000 stars. If every hundredth star had a solar system with just one habitable planet, the observable Metagalaxy would contain 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of creating and supporting life-forms. Yet so far, in all this vast profusion, not a single humanoid species had been discovered. The age-old question still remained: was man alone in all of Creation?

As a Myth Technologist seeking evidence for the Unified Psychic Field he thought this particularly ironic. To have progressed
from
Pre-Colonization
times when relativistic concepts were being propounded, to have isolated and identified the elementary
quark
sub-microscopic particles which were the basis of energy-matter, to have laid down the principles for the existence of psi phenomena (though not, it had to be admitted, allied them to any of the prime energy sources: electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear) – to have accomplished all this and still not established that life was or was not a general condition of the Metagalaxy. It seemed almost perverse, as if something unseen had erected a labyrinth of distorting mirrors which constantly hid from view the true nature of reality.

Man was not unique, he would not entertain the notion; besides which he intuitively believed that there had to be intelligent life elsewhere. In a galaxy of one hundred million solar systems with habitable planets, the law of probability indicated that a proportion must have developed or be in the process of developing Phase One, Phase Two or even Phase Three civilizations. Some of these, it was true, would have become biologically unstable and died out; some would have mutated and followed a dead end to extinction or failed to adapt quickly enough to changing conditions; and others would have wiped themselves out, as the human race had been in danger of doing a number of times Pre-Colonization.

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.'