James Axler – Demons of Eden

“Bunkum and bosh!” Doc declared, rapping the ferrule of his sword stick on the floor for emphasis. “Fairy tales in modern dress.”

“If anybody in this room has doubts about quantum physics, it shouldn’t be you,” Mildred said hotly. “Quantum physics dragged your scrawny ass across two centuries!”

“What’s this about?” Krysty asked.

J.B. looked up from cleaning his shotgun. “Millie’s trying to make scientific sense out of Joe’s bushwa. Her techno-bullshit got on Doc’s nerves. Can’t say as I blame him.”

“Techno-bullshit?” she echoed hotly. “Don’t hold me responsible for your poverty of comprehension, John!”

“Or mine,” Doc said.

Turning to Ryan and Krysty, he said, “Dr. Wyeth is spinning an entirely theoretical fable regarding the scientific foundation for Joe’s mythography about the so-called Cavern of Creation.”

Mildred’s face was locked in a stubborn mask. “Was the Totality Concept, which spun off Overproject Whisper, Project Cerberus and Operation Chronos and the mat-trans gateways, just theoretical? If we apply the insights of quantum mechanics to the mystery of this valley, then we can reach a sound hypothesis of how it was formed and created.”

Ryan repressed a smile. Mildred’s intellect was like an anteater’s tongue, always probing and poking into dark corners to find out what was there. Because of her scientific background, she continually tried to make some sort of sense out of the warped world in which she had awakened. Most of the time her theorizing made absolutely no difference about anything, especially her dissertations about genetics to explain the various human and animal mutie strains roaming Deathlands.

Still, there was no denying that her expertise in medicine and cryonics had saved all their lives at one time or another.

Ryan sat at the table. “What’s your hypothesis, Mildred?”

“The universe was formed from an explosion of gases, plasma and matter. It was known as the Big Bang theory. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume a collection of those energies exists on Earth, in a temporal pocket or packet, fueled by the beginnings of the universe when it was still a primal monobloc.”

Doc’s eyebrows knitted tightly together. “What?”

“The essential building blocks of the universe are no more than ripples in the quantum field. Everything, even hard matter, is stable patterns of these ripples. On a subatomic scale, what appears to be a vacuum is really vibrating and shifting with particle- and wav-icle-energy fluctuations. For example a single cubic centimeter of space can, theoretically, contain the hard matter energy equivalent of a thirty-megaton nuclear bomb.”

Ryan resisted the impulse to massage his temples.

Mildred continued, and judging by the timbre of her voice and the expression on her face, she was enthralled with her own words. “This is the quantum stream, which exists on a different plane of reality than our own reality. The scientists of the Totality Concept knew this and, with the aid of technology, managed to tap into it. All the spin-off researches of the Totality Concept used the stream as a transit network between the physical here and there . That’s basically how the gateways workup to and including time trawling.”

The irritated impatience on Doc’s face was slowly giving way to interest. “What does all that have to do with what Joe said?”

“It stands to reason that if the quantum stream can be tapped into, there should be any number of arteries branching off from the primary flow. If whatever is in the cavern is a naturally occurring artery of the quantum stream, then perhaps it contains the energies released in the first picoseconds following the Big Bang, channeling the matrix of protoparticles that swirled through the universe before physical laws fully stabilized.”

“You’ve lost me again,” Doc said with a head-shake.

“Me, too,” Ryan added. “Though this theory never really found me.”

Mildred sighed. “If Joe is speaking the truth as he knows it, this energy packet may exist slightly out of phase with this dimension, with our space-time, just like many subatomic particles. The cavern may be an interphase and an interface point between our reality and another.”

“Granting that all you say may possess a subatomic particle of truth,” Doc said with a devilish smile, “how does all of that account for the tree city and the crystalline structures?”