Through the Eye of Time Read online

  Through the Eye of Time

  Book Two of the Q Series

  Trevor Hoyle

  Also in the Q Series and available from Quercus and Jo Fletcher Books

  Seeking the Mythical Future

  The Gods Look Down

  First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Panther Books Ltd

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 1977 by Trevor Hoyle

  The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84866 931 4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk and

  www.jofletcherbooks.com

  ‘I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.’

  MAX BORN

  ‘Nach links und ein bisschen nach unten. Ach, das ist besser!’*

  ADOLF HITLER

  Acknowledgements

  The following have proved invaluable as reference sources and also as inspiration for a number of the ‘concepts’ which appear in this book: The Last Days of Hitler by H. R. Trevor-Roper (Macmillan, 1947; Pan, 1968); The Double Cross System by J. C. Masterman (Yale University Press, 1972, Sphere, 1973); Einstein by Banesh Hoffmann (Hart-Davis, Mac-Gibbon, 1973; Paladin, 1975); and not least C. G. Jung’s Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.

  I should also like to thank Pam Yeowart for her help with the German translations.

  For Nick Webb – a human, not to say humane, editor.

  In the beginning the heavens were void.

  Matter did not exist, and without matter neither time nor space. Nothing stirred in the entirety of non-Creation and minus time.

  Questions too, like the heavens, were void. There was no one to ask them and no one to answer, so the questions remained unasked and unanswered.

  Then into this cosmic enigma a question did appear: a question-mark composed of a single point of light: the Primeval Atom. With light came energy, and with energy matter, and with matter space, and with space time.

  The Holy Trinity:

  Time.

  Matter.

  Space.

  The universe had been born.

  Soon after its birth – one one hundred thousand billion billionth of a second – the point of light was at a temperature of one thousand billion billion degrees. The point of light began to cool.

  At one ten thousandth of a second after Creation, at a temperature of one thousand billion degrees, the first species of particle came into existence:

  The Hadron.

  Still later in the evolutionary process – a full one second after Creation at a temperature of ten billion degrees – the Hadron gave birth to the electron (matter) and the positron (anti-matter).

  Still later at a temperature of one billion degrees, protons and neutrons were created. Growing in abundance as the Primeval Atom expanded they formed a plasma of charged particles which, one hundred seconds after birth at a temperature of one thousand million degrees, fused together to produce one-tenth helium out of all the matter in the universe.

  The helium was trapped in the primordial expanding gas, awaiting the moment when it would condense to form nebulae, galaxies, stars.

  This was the Hadron Era, and with its family of psi particles determined the size and distribution of all the galaxies in the universe. Hadrons were the master templates for the ordering of matter, the DNA of Creation.

  The Hadrons were something more: the first particles to possess cosmic intelligence. The universe was their creation: matter and anti-matter, time and minus time, quarks and anti-quarks. The Beginning and the End of all Creation.

  Everything came from the Hadron.

  1

  The Discrete Charm of the Quark

  MyTT had grown over the years. Funded as a co-operative research establishment by the nine planetary and five planetoidal states, it was situated on Earth IVn, within comfortable proximity – 4.2 parsecs – of the Temporal Flux Centre 2U0525-06 in the inertial frame of reference Theta2 Orionis in M.42. This meant that the round trip to and from the Tempus satellite Control Laboratory wouldn’t greatly affect the life-spans of the technical and flight personnel – which was inevitable even though they travelled via the E.M.I. Field. The standard greeting of those returning from deep space, upon stepping down to earth, was still ‘God bless Oliver Heaviside’, though few among them remembered that he was the nineteenth century English physicist who had first established the principle of Electro-Magnetic Interference.

  The building was in the shape of a pyramid with the apex chopped off, as if a giant had taken a swipe at it with a meat cleaver, and from the flattened roof sprouted all strange manner of antenna, grouped round the opaque orange dome which housed the Black Body Radiation detection equipment. Queghan had never fathomed out why, but apparently it was necessary to compute precisely the absolute velocity of Earth IVn relative to the universe as a whole. Black Body Radiation was the universal constant, the lingering aftermath of the explosion which had created the expanding universe, and as such it could be used to relate the speed of a body passing through it.

  Not that it was necessary for him to understand. Queghan wasn’t a hardline scientist: he was a Myth Technologist, an occupation which straddled the Two Disciplines.

  For over a year now he had been engaged on an investigation of psi particles, and in particular their relationship (if any) with the acausal nature of time, a phenomenon known in the jargon of Myth Technology as proemptosis: ‘the occurrence of an event before the calculated date’. Psi particles were a family of ultra-sub-atomic constituents called quarks, a name which suited their mysterious, almost mythical existence. For did they, in fact, exist? The scientific establishment (in the manner of scientific establishments) had classified them in neat categories: red quarks, blue quarks, black quarks. They had endowed them with spurious characteristics: charm, strangeness, anti-charm and anti-strangeness. And they had proposed that they inhabited ‘a region of probability.’

  So far so good.

  But the question had yet to be answered: what the hell were they? It had been shown, for example, that they had a disorienting effect on time, so could it be that time itself was not a smooth continuous motion but composed of discrete particles, the quarks, which could be isolated and identified? Matter, it had been demonstrated, consisted of nothing more substantial than a ‘wave motion of probability’. Was time probabilistic in the same fashion? Could it be slowed down, stopped, reversed and juggled about with in the same way that quantum engineers had succeeded in tinkering with the four unified energy forces: electromagnetic, gravitational, the strong and weak nuclear interactions?

  It seemed to Queghan that the universe was a question-mark. As he had once remarked to Johann Karve, Director of MyTT: ‘I get the feeling that somebody somewhere is having one hell of a joke
at our expense. The Greatest Practical Joke Of All Time.’

  Karve had consoled him. ‘If that’s so, we’re all victims of the Joker, whoever he is. Nobody’s party to it, Chris, that you can be sure of.’

  But a joke wasn’t a joke unless it was shared, Queghan felt. Where was the fun in the Joker laughing quietly to himself in some secluded corner of the universe? Unless, of course, he was mad.

  The dichotomy between the Two Disciplines was never more keenly felt than when discussing the underlying purpose – for as a metaphysical science it was the task of Myth Technology to ask the elemental questions. Queghan had friends on both sides of the divide: hardliners who believed in a nuts-and-bolts universe holding itself aloft by its own bootstraps, and those others, ‘mystics’ as they were somewhat derisively called, who were seeking the Godhead in whatever form it might choose to present itself to human consciousness. There was evidence to support both viewpoints, which was why Queghan found himself in the awkward position of agreeing and disagreeing with the two sides. It was even conceivable that both were right and both were wrong; perhaps there was no eternal all-embracing truth, simply a set of hypotheses which changed according to individual interpretation. The universe as a fact didn’t exist – truth lay in the eyes of the observer, not in some objective reality which could be codified and classified and set down on micro-tape to rot away in Archives.

  Nevertheless it was depressing, when surveying the work done over centuries since the time of Colonization, not to have arrived at a more positive conclusion. The elemental nature of spacetime was still shrouded in mystery, even though mankind had developed such concepts as the E.M.I. Field, had investigated those regions of infinite spacetime curvature, Temporal Flux Centres, known to scientists Pre-Colonization as Black Holes.

  Yes, it was true, much had been achieved: the human species had been liberated from its own backyard, but it still left Queghan with the simplest and yet most complex task of all: wrestling with the enigma of those infuriating, mythical, charming quarks.

  *

  When the terra-formers had constructed Earth IVn they had given it two moons. There was no valid astrophysical or geographical reason for this, although on the planet itself it did mean that the wave barrages bordering the oceans were able to provide fifty per cent more energy output, utilizing the contra rotation and diametric opposition of the two satellites. And it gave the songwriters a rich new vein of material: By the Light of the Silvery Moons, Blue Moons, Those Old Devil Moons, and the latest popular hit, How High the Moons.

  But there were other effects which hadn’t been anticipated and which caused a good deal of consternation, not to say discomfort. One of these was the disruption of the female menstrual cycle. It now became clear that the 28-day ovulation period was governed by the moon of Old Earth: human evolution over millions of years had taken its cue from the motion of heavenly bodies, and the reproductive cycle was thrown into confusion by the effect of this additional gravitational force. Some women menstruated twice in the month while others ceased having a period at all. So medical science came up with the Anti-Pill to stabilize this unhappy state of affairs and once again women were able to resume their ‘natural’ function.

  This came as no real surprise to Christian Queghan, for whom Myth Technology was as much a calling as a profession. Every sub-atomic particle – the fact of its existence – affected every other particle in the universe. Subtract a single constituent, just one, and the effect on all the rest would be incalculable. It might be great or small but it would be real and, eventually, apparent.

  He was a man of studious contemplation, a strange taciturn man caught up in the vortices of metaphysical speculation. The office in which he worked on Level 17 was very much like a cell, an ascetic retreat with bare walls and a slanting triangular window filled with blue sky. The warm imprint of the sun moved imperceptibly across the floor, crept into a corner, illuminated a spiders web to rainbow iridescence, and stole diagonally up the wall to the soundproof ceiling. The only items of furniture were a desk, two chairs, a bookcase, a tape library and a cyberthetic print-out terminal.

  There was, too, an artefact which puzzled and intrigued most visitors: a holograph encased in a small thermoplastic bubble which could simulate a three-dimensional representation of any person, place or thing that Queghan cared to visualize. This required intense concentration and it was an invaluable tool for keeping his gift of mythic projection in good working order. When visitors were invited to try it, all that they could manage was a ten-second burst of visual static very similar to a snowstorm; then Queghan would ask what they had hoped to see and project his interpretation of their vision. It was nothing more than a toy, albeit a useful one.

  Above the door in the corridor was a warning red light. When lit it meant that the door was sealed and that Queghan was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. He was ‘taking a trip’ as Director Karve termed it, and everyone on Level 17 was instructed to keep well away. One wag had said, ‘What if the complex is on fire? Do we let him burn?’ and glanced slyly at the others standing nearby, and Karve had neatly wiped the smile off his face by replying, ‘If there is a fire Queghan will project himself back to yesterday and warn us about it, so we will prevent it happening before it starts.’ Nobody knew whether or not to take this as a joke; Karve seemed deadly serious.

  Neither were they sure what to make of Queghan himself. To begin with, his physical appearance was … disturbing. He was quite tall, nearly seven feet, with broad angular shoulders that seemed out of place on his lean frame; his face had been described as ‘cadaverous’, and his white hair and eyebrows compounded the incongruity. His age was indeterminate. A few people, close friends, knew of the mark just below the collarbone on his left shoulder: a pale discoloration of the skin in the shape of a Q. Whether it was a birthmark or a symbol of something more enigmatic – brand? stigma? – nobody knew, not even Karve. No one ever asked if Queghan himself was aware of its significance.

  As with all meaningful coincidences (Queghan would have said, ‘Show me a coincidence that isn’t acausally meaningful’), on the day that Johann Karve received the latest data from the CENTiNEL Particle Accelerator set within the Dyson Electromagnetic Sphere adjacent to 2U0525-06, the cyberthetic terminal in Queghan’s room had an attack of electronic hiccups. It was a brief malfunction but Queghan pondered on it the rest of the afternoon. He had asked for information relating to the charmed quark’s rate of radioactive decay, and within seconds back came the reply:

  NO REFERENCE AS SUCH. HOWEVER BY CROSS-REFERENCE INDEX CAN SUGGEST THE FOLLOWING:

  (1) RATE OF SENILE DECAY FOR BOGUS MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF OTHERS (ESP. OPPOSITE SEX) AS PER POPULATION MEDIAN SHOWS NO OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTIC.

  (2) QUERY RADIOACTIVE. DOCTORS IN NUCLEAR WARFARE SITUATION???

  (3) QUERY CHARM-ED??? CHARM-ING???

  (4) EXAMPLE OF FORMER IS BOVARY/CHARLES, FICTIONAL CHARACTER OF ‘MADAME BOVARY’, FLAUBERT/GUSTAVE, PUBLISHED 1857 (PRE-COL). EXAMPLE OF LATTER IS MORELL/THEODOR, PHYSICIAN AND CLOSE COMPANION OF HITLER/ADOLF 1936-1945 (PRE-COL).

  MORE INFORMATION ON FILE RE BOTH. PLEASE ADVISE WHICH. IF THAT’S NOT ASKING TOO MUCH.

  The closing remark was what passed for sardonic humour in the solid-state brain of the cyberthetic system, a machine intelligence with reasoning and deductive capability. Queghan punched back the rejoinder:

  DON’T BE CHEEKY, CYB

  and looked again at the print-out. What possible connection could Charles Bovary and Theodor Morell have with the rate of radioactive decay of the charmed quark? The system had queried ‘radioactive’, though it was a common enough word in its program vocabulary, a word it used perhaps fifty times a day. He thought of calling Systems Engineering and asking them to check out the circuit, and then decided against it. Apart from the fact that the system was self-monitoring and would automatically register a malfunction, the idea of pursuing this line of inquiry, thrown up out of nowhere,
intrigued him. It had to mean something: if the system felt he should be interested in a fictional character of nineteenth-century literature and Hitler’s personal physician during World War II (Pre-Col), then perhaps he ought to be.

  The holograph was on the desk in front of him. Queghan narrowed his concentration down to a single beam, closing his mind to the outside world. His breathing became shallow, his heartbeat slowed, his neurochemical metabolism was held in stasis. Within the smooth thermoplastic sphere a series of images flickered and passed swiftly away; now and then he retained one for closer inspection, held back a fleeting impression for any significant detail it might contain—

  A large airless over-furnished room. A man at his desk in sombre contemplation, gazing through the window at a distant church spire, his hands clasped in front of him in an attitude that might have been anguish or supplication. Like himself, Flaubert was in a far-away world inhabited by the phantoms of his imagination. The page in front of him on the table was half completed, the script a minuscule scrawl overlaid with a hieroglyph of additions, deletions, parentheses, arrows and question-marks. There were several other pages of manuscript scattered over the desk, some of them so heavily scored that the pen had bitten through the paper.

  Queghan observed the scene, being careful not to upset the equilibrium of the image in case it revealed his presence. The writer would undoubtedly take fright at the sudden appearance of an apparition from the future, to his eyes a ‘ghost’ materializing out of nowhere.

  But there was nothing here to trigger an alarm or alert Queghan’s instincts: the image had the authentic and unremarkable feel and smell of nineteenth-century France, and Flaubert too, with his perfumed hair and ink-stained fingers, fitted neatly into the tableau.

  What was the cyberthetic system playing at? Queghan wondered, back once more in the bare room on Level 17. The rays of sunlight were now obscured by rags of purple cloud. He looked again at the print-out and began to smile, the heavy creases deepening at his eyes and mouth. He had been duped by his own innate gifts, for he had been seeking a dark and devious reason for the machine error when – it was now obvious – the cause was nothing more than a keyboard mistake that any trainee operator might make.