Seeking the Mythical Future (14 page)

*

Do you think NELLIE has a future?' Milton Blake said.

‘In respect of the Project?'

‘That's what I had in mind.'

‘Yes, there's no question,' Queghan said slowly. He had not yet returned to the everyday world of common sense and causality; his eyes lingered on the blank display for a moment. ‘I think in fact that the applications are wider than we had anticipated. What you have here could make a tremendous contribution to Myth Technology, in particular to our applied-research program. There are certain repositories of knowledge contained in ancient myths and legends: we are our own myth-makers, and we unconsciously create legends and symbols which express hidden truths.'

‘The leys,' Blake said, smiling. ‘I've read up on some of the jargon you mythographers use.'

‘The leys themselves are the links which connect the areas of truth and beauty, harmony and order throughout the Metagalaxy. We perceive them only randomly, and when we do we rarely understand their true meaning. But with this' – he indicated the display – ‘we can conjure up visually our deepest, most intuitive, most elusive feelings; we can record and study and interpret.'

‘The display makes no distinction between reality, memory, myth or fantasy,' Blake pointed out.

‘Perhaps there is no distinction,' Queghan said. ‘Among the many meanings of the word “fantasy” you'll find the definition "a visionary idea or speculation.” We are in the business of pursuing visionary ideas and speculations and trying to understand them.'

‘You think the red ocean has a mythic quality?'

I'm positive that it has,' Queghan answered. ‘The vessel that rescued him from the ocean, the captain and crew, the experiment in the sanatorium, the airship taking him to the concentration camp, are all glimpses of a mythical world which is just as valid as our own.'

‘Even though imaginary—'

‘
Even
though?' Queghan said. ‘Even though what? The reversal of causality and the dynamics of probability point to the
fact that imaginary planes of existence have equal validity with anything we can physically detect with our senses and our instruments. We know by observation that the Metagalaxy ought to contain perhaps ten times as much matter as it appears to contain; we are part of the observable ten per cent, so in point of fact we're the minor portion
^*
. The bulk of it is hidden from us, and to that other, greater part of the Metagalaxy, wherever it is to be found,
we
are the imaginary missing piece.'

Blake looked down through the observation plate at the patient, now calm and bathed in sweat. The medical staff were removing the apparatus connected to his head.

He said, ‘Without entirely disputing what you say, Chris, I think Stahl has borrowed rather than invented or conjured up some of the material. For one thing, he believes he's being held in a place called Psy-Con, when it's clear to me that he's simply transferred the name of the PSYCON Unit into his fantasy.'

‘Did it ever occur to you that the reverse might be true?' Queghan said. ‘Perhaps he transposed Psy-Con into PSYCON.'

‘Yes,' Milton Blake said slowly, looking at Queghan.

*

The theory positing the existence of Temporal Flux Centres was by no means new or revolutionary: it had a long and involved scientific history stretching back to Pre-Colonization times. It had been in the year 1798 (Gregorian calendar) that the French mathematician Pierre Laplace, using Newton's theory of gravitation as the basis for his calculations, had forecast that a body above a certain critical mass and density would prevent light escaping from its surface and would therefore be invisible to any outside observer. With his equations in the early part of the twentieth century, Einstein came forward with conclusive proof that a body of such mass and density was not only possible but mathematically inevitable.

Then in 1916 (Gc), Karl Schwarzschild, working on the relativistic principle of spacetime distortion, calculated the critical
radius of an extremely small, extremely massive spherical object – such as a White Dwarf – and arrived at a set of equations which could be used to define this radius for any object, no matter how large or small. This became known as the
Schwarzschild Radius
^*
, and, once having achieved it, an object would distort spacetime so severely that nothing could ever escape from it. The sun of Old Earth, for example, with a radius of 700,000 kilometres, would have to be compressed to a radius of three kilometres before it achieved Temporal Flux – or as it was known in the early days of discovery – a ‘Black Hole'.

For many years Pre-Colonization, the existence of Blade Holes was a matter for speculation and controversy. The main problem was how to locate a body which emitted no radiation of any kind and was totally invisible to observers using visual and electromagnetic sensing equipment. Two methods were postulated as a means of detecting these elusive creatures: the measurement of gravitational radiation and the single-line spectroscopic binary system. Joseph Weber of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study was the first, with his Paper
Gravitational Radiation Experiments
published in 1970 (Gc), to claim an experimental result which might confirm the existence of Temporal Flux Centres in the denser parts of the Milky Way galaxy. Synchronized instruments placed 600 miles apart had detected short violent bursts of gravitational energy – so violent that the only explanation was that entire stars were being sucked into and swallowed by Temporal Flux Centres, their abrupt extinction being accompanied by a burst of radiation many millions of times more powerful than could be accounted for by any other known phenomenon in the universe.

The evidence provided by a study of single-line spectroscopic binary systems was even more conclusive. In the latter part of the twentieth century detailed and systematic observation showed that of the binary (double star) systems, a number possessed invisible companions, which were detectable by the influence they exerted on the visible star. Some of these companions, on further investigation, turned out to be old dead
Stars or, as in the case of Sirius B in Alpha Canis Maj oris, White Dwarfs. But a significant proportion were found to possess invisible companions of sufficient mass and density to fit the category of Temporal Flux Centre, notably HD226868, Theta
²
Orionis in M.42, Epsilon Aurigae lying close to Capidla, and the eclipsing binary Beta Lyrae near the brilliant blue Star Vega.

This was the foundation upon which the subsequent study of [Temporal Flux Centres was based. It progressed theoretically but languished in practice in Pre-Colonization times because of man's inability to escape the Solar System. It required – it depended upon – the development of interstellar travel, which took four centuries to achieve. The breakthrough was prosaic, almost archaic, for it was the rediscovery of the work done by an obscure English electrical engineer in the nineteenth century, Oliver Heavyside, which finally led, almost by accident, to a modification of Einsteinian physics.

It was a basic tenet of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity that nothing possessing mass can exceed lightspeed; by employing the Heavyside formulae, which dealt with the interaction of electromagnetic waves and gravitational energy, it was shown that this rule didn't apply when the force of gravitation was balanced out, or negated, by the action of electromagnetic pulses of energy. In a real sense, it made precise use of the Einsteinian concept of
relativity
 – ironically turning it against itself – for if nothing could exceed lightspeed and yet lightspeed itself was relative (depending on the point of reference from which it was being observed) then it followed that while lightspeed could not be exceeded in a local frame of reference, in cosmic terms the absolute velocity of lightspeed had no meaning: it was a variable factor
^*
. The Galaxy, relative to other galaxies, was moving beyond lightspeed, and, once a method could be found to ‘break out' of the local frame of reference, then interstellar travel would evolve to a problem of technology.

This ‘breaking out' was achieved by a rupturing of four-dimensional
spacetime – a concept impossible to visualize which could only be expressed mathematically. To students it was explained as being analogous to a race of people living on a videovision screen. Imagine, they were told, that these people had only two dimensions – length and breadth, but no depth – and whose world is totally confined to this flat two-dimensional plane. They have no knowledge of ‘roundness', they are thin, flat creatures who have no idea that a third dimension exists. But we, as outside observers, can see clearly that a third dimension
does
exist in which it is possible to move around. Further imagine, they were asked, these flatlanders to be living on a sphere: they can move forwards or backwards, to left or right, but not up or down. If they decide to travel along the surface of their sphere (to them it will appear completely flat) they will travel on for ever, believing themselves to be in an endless universe. Now if we transfer this concept of a two-dimensional world to our three-dimensional one, we can understand, if not visualize, a fourth dimension which our senses are incapable of detecting. We are in a sense three-dimensional ‘flatlanders' existing in a four-dimensional universe. And just as the two-dimensional people travelling round their sphere will eventually arrive back where they started from, so we, heading deeper into the Metagalaxy, will eventually arrive back at our starting point.

This schoolboy analogy was complicated by the dynamics of spacetime curvature. As predicted by Einstein's gravitational field equations, spacetime was not an absolute uniform medium permeating all of Creation, but was affected – ‘wrinkled' or ‘curved' – by the presence of bodies embedded in it. Planets moved in orbit round the sun not because the sun attracted them (as in the Newtonian model of gravitation) but because the spacetime curvature exerted by the sun's presence confined the motion of planets to a circular world-line. In spacetime curvature, these circular motions were represented by geodesics which, paradoxically, showed that the shortest distance between two points was not a straight line but a curved one.

This same work, almost incidentally, provided the theoretical evidence for the existence of Temporal Flux Centres, for
when a body of immense mass and density collapsed beyond the Schwarzschild Radius it distorted surrounding spacetime to such an extent that the curvature was total; spacetime folded in upon itself and formed a ‘singularity' – the structure of matter was annihilated in a region of infinite spacetime curvature. And just as planets followed their world-lines round the sun (a relatively gentle effect of spacetime curvature), so the particles of energy and matter in a Temporal Flux Centre were subject to the curvature of spacetime in its most devastating and obliterating form.

The work of Heavyside, which had lain dormant for centuries, was amazingly apposite when applied to the problem of how to overcome the limiting factor of lightspeed. His particular passion had been for electromagnetism – a new and unexplored field in his day – which seemed only remotely linked to relativistic physics, the great crowning glory of scientific achievement in the twentieth century. Yet it was Heavyside who laid down the principle of
‘electromagnetic interference' (EMI)
, whereby gravitational energy could be diverted or controlled, creating not so much an anti-gravity field as a change in its astro-physical properties. This in itself was exciting but not significant – until one brought in the concept of spacetime curvature and the varying speed of light in a gravitational field. If one could control gravity by means of an electromagnetic force, then it must follow that lightspeed was also capable of manipulation. Interstellar distances, which were indeed vast, could be conquered, not by travelling across them in the conventional sense, but by
relativistically reducing the distance to be travelled
. It was the classic case of bringing the mountain to Mohammed: moving the destination closer (ie varying the factor of lightspeed) so that the time it took to travel there was shorter.

This introduced a new branch of astro-technology, because it soon became evident that interstellar vehicles didn't require propulsion units, nuclear, chemical or any other type. In fact they didn't require anything. It was only necessary to place the vehicle in a field of electromagnetic interference, set the spatiotemporal coordinates, and press the button. For practical purposes,
the field was created in deep space in a quiet and uncluttered part of the Solar System. This was to reduce the radiation hazard and also to prevent accidents: anything inside the field would be transported to the destination, and, if set up on earth, would have meant the staff and laboratory going along for the ride too, whatever their personal feelings or preferences.

The beauty and utter simplicity of the EMI Field, from the astro-technologists' point of view, was that lightspeed, far from limiting their technical capability as had once been feared, actually became the key which opened the door to interstellar travel. Without this ‘golden mean' they would have had to resort to such tedious methods as those of suspended animation or ‘generation' space vessels as huge as several ocean liners, or some fanciful invention like ‘hyperdrive', beloved of SF writers of the era Pre-Colonization. In fact it was amusing to look back to those times and read of the devious, almost perverse ways in which both scientists and fiction writers sought to overcome the ‘insurmountable' problem of faster-than-light travel. Their mistake was in treating it as a barrier, an impasse somehow to be avoided, when all along it was an ally: lightspeed itself was the answer staring them in the face.

And now a new step in cosmic exploration was about to be taken. Man was preparing to enter that region of the Metagalaxy existing alongside, or even within, the observable universe. It was there, it existed, of that there could be no doubt: the Hidden Universe where the laws of space and time, energy and matter, were changed beyond recognition. The way in – the only way – was via the one-way membrane of a Temporal Flux Centre; and man was about to take the first step.