Through the Eye of Time by Trevor Hoyle Page B

from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
    â€˜RECONPAN has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was a Research Committee decision to fund it. I’m not responsible.’
    â€˜No, that’s right, I am.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, Johann.’ Queghan got up and paced about. ‘It’s just that the bloody woman wouldn’t even meet me halfway. I don’t know what’s going on, I just have this instinctive feeling that something somewhere is wrong. But how do you explain that to a hardliner? DeGrenier won’t accept anything unless it’s in black and white on a cyberthetic print-out.’
    His annoyance, Karve realized, had deeper roots than Queghan was prepared to admit. Perhaps he felt guilty. The Director said casually:
    â€˜I don’t suppose you looked into her mind.’
    Queghan carried on pacing. Finally he did say, ‘It wasn’tintentional, maybe for a moment or two.’ He wouldn’t meet Karve’s eye. ‘She wouldn’t realize, Johann. Probably feel uncomfortable and then forget all about it. It’s second nature with me, you know that.’
    â€˜Hardliners are suspicious of mythographers as it is without you poking around in their heads. And Pouline deGrenier isn’t a fool, she’d guess what you were up to.’
    Queghan paced. He was tall and rangy but there was an abundance of nervous energy that his body couldn’t contain. Karve knew that the physical activity was simply a displacement of intellectual frustration. Queghan was stuck for a direction and the signposts were either misleading or nonexistent.
    â€˜Did you read the CENTiNEL report?’ asked the Director.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Odd, isn’t it?’
    â€˜I’d hardly describe the disintegration of spacetime as “odd”.’
    â€˜You’re being churlish again.’
    â€˜It’s the mood I’m in.’
    â€˜Have we got it wrong, do you suppose? Is there another interpretation – a simple one – we’ve overlooked?’
    â€˜We’re assuming the data are correct.’
    â€˜They’ve been verified by cyberthetic analysis.’
    â€˜As far as we know the rate of decay of mu-mesons has never altered. We know – we thought we knew – how they behaved, and now all at once we observe a series of particle interactions which don’t fit the pattern,’ Queghan sat down. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
    â€˜For heaven’s sake, don’t say that.’ Karve gave a wan smile. ‘My guesses aren’t worth two a penny at present.’ He puffed some more smoke into the air. ‘If we go right back to the earliest phase, the time of the primeval atom, we know that there must have been an equivalent number of anti-protons and anti-neutrons in existence to complement the positively-charged particles—’
    â€˜Quantum theory tells us so but we don’t know it for a fact. There was nobody around at the time to collect samples.’
    â€˜We have to have a premise of some kind,’ Karve said, notunreasonably. ‘We didn’t at one time believe in the existence of Temporal Flux Centres and now we find them throughout the universe. As the only man on the fourteen Colonized States to have been inside one I should have thought you’d grant me the courtesy of an accepted hypothesis.’
    Queghan said, ‘The thought in your mind is that I’m being churlish again.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜You’re right, I am, carry on.’
    â€˜So we have anti-particles. We also have White Holes, as complementary companions to Temporal Flux Centres; and we mustn’t forget your particular favourites, the mythical anti-quark family.’
    â€˜They’d never forgive you if you left them out.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t dream of it. Now as far as we know all anti-particles are existing in minus time, which is the mirror-image of the spatio-temporal