Through the Eye of Time Read Online Free Page A

penetrating her body.
    Queghan bent forward to kiss her, wondering what he ought to feel and what his response should be.

2

RECONPAN
    Johann Karve had spent a restless night. As a rule he slept soundly, untroubled by whatever cares the day had heaped upon his ageing shoulders; but the latest results from the CENTiNEL Particle Accelerator had been more than merely disturbing, they had been alarming.
    He sat at his desk on Level 40 of MyTT drinking lukewarm tea from a china cup, turning the pages of research data: column after column of nine-digit numbers which varied only by the last two, in some cases the last three, decimal places. These were the reassuring ones. But here and there amongst the endless rows of grey figures a red asterisk shrilled a warning like a beacon on a foggy night. His first and natural conclusion, after observing these maverick numbers, had been ‘cyberthetic malfunction’. It was the obvious explanation, the calming shot which numbed the shock to the sensory nerve system and intellectual processes. Or failing that explanation (and it had died a miserable death on reading the addendum to the report which stated that the data had been independently verified) one could always suppose that the Particle Accelerator itself had detected a freak interaction of mu-meson particles in the region of the Temporal Flux Centre
2U0525-06
. After all, it was an unusual region of spacetime where time dilation was at optimum.
    Yet even this would not do. As Director of the Myth Technology Research Institute he had to rely on the expertise of hardline scientists, but he was not such a fool that he couldn’t read a particle accelerator report and interpret the findings in a meaningful fashion. The decay rate of mu-mesons was precisely calibrated: cyberthetic analysis had already allowed for the fact that they lived seven times longer than was theoretically possible. Created by the collision between energeticprotons emanating from super-nova explosions elsewhere in the galaxy, their very high speeds – a fraction below lightspeed – enabled them to age slower than other particles in the same spatio-temporal co-ordinate.
    And not only were the mu-mesons behaving strangely. The really worrying aspect was that a whole range of elementary psi particles, companions of the neutron and proton, denoted Σ, Λ, Ξ and so on, had suddenly taken it into their heads to alter their rates of decay. If time dilation wasn’t the culprit this left only one possibility, but it was the one Karve was reluctant to accept.
    In simple terms it meant that the fabric of spacetime was disintegrating.
    The atomic structure of elementary particles, which constituted the stuff of energy and matter, was behaving erratically and breaking all the rules of physics. The figures in front of him were evidence of this – these ordered grey columns which foretold that organic structure, and time itself, were breaking down. There would be no cataclysmic explosion, no supra-galactic event to signal the end of time – merely the creeping infinitesimal process of disintegration and decay.
    And how would this process announce itself? Karve picked up the china cup and supported it lightly by the outspread tips of his fingers. Inside this ‘dead’ piece of matter a thousand billion billion particles were busily humming away in their orbits: atoms within molecules; electrons, protons and neutrons within atoms; and within these sub-atomic particles the infinitely smaller constituent parts which were the wave-forms of pure energy. Nothing very dramatic was required to make this whole elaborate structure crumble into nothingness, to dissipate itself in a burst of radiation. True, the amount of radiation generated would be enough to devastate an area several kilometres square, but essentially the atomic structure would simply have to break the rules and stop behaving as it had done since the formation of the