Through the Eye of Time (11 page)

‘An alien intelligence?' Queghan looked at Dr Zander but she didn't rise to the bait. She was watching him closely and he couldn't read her expression. ‘Not once, in all these years of exploration, have we made contact with any other intelligent life-form. Naturally we're expecting them to be humanoid, to have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and, if male, a five o'clock shadow. Isn't it more likely that they're in a form we don't recognize as life, crystalline perhaps, or gaseous, or even sub-nuclear? Mankind is a biological accident, a freak life-form that just happened to evolve on a cosy planet near a friendly sun. I'd find it much more credible, if I were writing the scenario, to make my life-forms more in keeping with the organic structure of the universe I was constructing – matter and energy in their constituent parts. And that applies equally to anti-matter existing in minus time. It's arrogant pigheaded chauvinism to believe otherwise.'

‘A self-aware intelligence composed of anti-matter,' Herff said, tasting the sound of it.

‘Not necessarily. The intelligence could be of our universe, using anti-matter as an energy source, either for constructive or destructive purposes.'

‘The anti-matter bomb,' Dr Zander said. She was vaguely amused. ‘The ultimate weapon.'

As if suddenly waking up to the notion Herff said, ‘If there was an intelligent life-form composed of sub-atomic particles – mu-mesons, leptons, hadrons, whatever – it couldn't find a more efficient energy source than anti-matter, providing it could exercise proper control.'

‘Particles controlling other particles,' Queghan said. ‘It
doesn't sound so very different from people controlling other people.'

Riemann said, ‘But for what purpose? Any of this might be feasible, it's more or less implied by accepted quantum theory, but that still leaves the question Why? What is it trying to achieve?'

‘Do you suppose a protoplasm can comprehend our world?' Queghan said. ‘Does it even know that we exist? And supposing it did know, how could it communicate with us? We're in the position of a protoplasm in relation to a life-form composed of sub-nuclear particles. Perhaps it knows that we exist, just as we know the protoplasm exists, but its means of communication are beyond our senses and our technology. How do we
begin
to communicate with something that lives in space, that can travel between galaxies at lightspeed, whose time-scale is measured at one extreme in thousand billionths of a second and at the other in millennia, that can pass through solid matter as though it was a hazy patch of mist? How can we ask the purpose of a life-form so alien to our own that its presence is only apparent as a trace on a photographic plate? You might just as well ask that chair you're sitting on if it believes in the existence of God.'

‘Is this how mythographers spend their time?' Dr Zander inquired dryly.

‘Do you mean inventing fictions?'

‘No, please don't misunderstand. I'm not trying to be clever at your expense.'

‘You're not?' It was Queghan's turn to be sardonic.

‘I'm intrigued at the way the mind of a mythographer works.You seem to attack a problem in several different directions and on a number of levels simultaneously.'

‘I take that as a compliment.'

‘It wasn't meant as criticism.'

‘If you mean that mythographers can provide the questions but not the answers I'd have to agree; the only sense I trust is my instinct.'

‘So you've brought the questions along and it's up to us to find the answers?' Dr Zander said, lounging in her chair.

‘Not the best of bargains I agree,' Queghan said. ‘I don't
even know where to start looking. But at least you have the Particle Accelerator; one or two of the answers might be lurking there.'

‘If we knew what we were looking for.'

Max Herff said, ‘I don't know if my instinct is in as good a working order as Queghan's, but I suggest we set up a program of anti-particle investigation. If we can locate an inverse shift in radioactive decay which corresponds to the mu-meson findings it would at least be an indication that we're heading in the right direction. Where we go after that I haven't a clue.'

‘What temperatures are you operating at?' Queghan asked.

‘Ten billion degrees,' said Riemann.

‘Can you go higher?'

‘We could,' Riemann said cautiously. ‘It might create problems with the Dyson Electromagnetic Sphere. The Sphere is holding the Temporal Flux Centre in equilibrium by means of a one-million-volt field. A major increase in temperature could upset the balance.' He looked uncertainly at Max Herff.

‘How high do you want to go?' Herff said.

‘One thousand billion degrees.'

There was an absolute stunned silence. Riemann laughed nervously and it turned into a fit of choking. Dr Zander said, ‘The impossible we can do right away. Miracles take a little longer.'

‘One
thousand
billion?' Herff said. He had the crinkled weeping look on his face again.

‘That would seem to be the region if we're chasing the antimatter equivalents to the mu-mesons,' Queghan said. ‘At temperatures above one thousand billion degrees we get the entire range of hadronic particles and their anti-matter companions.'

There was a further silence while everyone adjusted their mental horizons to the power of 10
¹²
.

Finally Riemann ventured to say, ‘We could do it by raising the energy component to correspond to that temperature. That's the only way I can see.'

Dr Zander smiled. It was a genuine smile, if rather bemused. ‘When you have a hunch,' she said to Queghan, ‘you sure do have a hunch.'

Pouline deGrenier sat alone in the darkened office. Through the curved panel to her left she could see the flickering display of lights in the laboratory: symmetrical patterns of red, green, orange and magenta glowing momentarily in sequence and then going out, glowing, going out as in some mysterious and inexplicable ritual. Now and then came the faint whirr of a timing device followed by the subdued
click
of a circuit-breaker disconnecting itself according to predetermined plan.

There's something satisfying about machines (this was the thought preoccupying her); care for them and see to their needs and they won't let you down. It was a good feeling to know they were working selflessly, tirelessly, through the night, keeping temperature, pressure, saline content and the other vital processes within the safety parameters. Alert for the merest hint of trouble.

She wondered, in a detached sort of way, what need it was fulfilling – in her. Was it that she had control, that the machines were docile obedient slaves willing to do anything she asked? Did everything, in the end, come down to the ego's insatiable driving greed for self-assertion, for power, for the right to indulge itself at the expense of other people, other things, everything not of the ego itself?

I'm not an ambitious woman, she thought, I'm really not. I want the project to be a success, I want to see it work as it was meant to work, but I don't seek the power that Karla Ritblat has made the absolute reason for living. She craves it like a drug. Nothing must stand in her way, and if something does, it must be swept aside regardless of human feeling. But wasn't Karla Ritblat in the process destroying the point of her work, its essential purpose and meaning? Scientific achievement
didn't operate in a vacuum, it wasn't an end in itself. Its purpose, surely, was to advance humanity, to provide knowledge that would ultimately be of benefit to mankind, to make human beings more aware of their humanness. Karla Ritblat, in losing sight of this, might just as well have been one of the machines in the Psycho-Med Faculty, as cold and bloodless and detached as an electroencephalogram.

Pouline deGrenier shuddered. I mustn't become like that. I'm alive, I want to live, I want to love a man and have babies. Without these things what is the point in being a woman?

She touched her breasts and felt the faint stirring of quickening response. Her body was seeping fluid and she was both excited and ashamed of herself. Is it possible … could I invent a machine to make love to me? she wondered, and at once smiled at the absurdity of the idea. It was also rather sad – she knew this too – that a healthy woman in the prime of nubility should entertain such thoughts.

‘You're short of only one thing, Pouline deGrenier,' she told herself aloud, with mock sternness, ‘and that's a good fucking.'

The sound of her own voice startled her. She glanced round: was someone out there in the shadowed laboratory, listening to her? She almost made herself believe that there was – a man undoubtedly, a secret lover spying on her, watching her face and reading her thoughts.

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.