The Gods Look Down by Trevor Hoyle Page B

that the light sensing arrays glittered like diamond chips. He sucked air through the respiratory implant and said, ‘I wanted answers to my questions and instead we’re faced with a new set of riddles. The purpose of the machine is as obscure as ever.’
    Milton Blake was by nature a calm man, not given to emotional outbursts, but there were certain things which roused him to anger, callous behaviour and ingratitude being near the top of the list; now he was on the verge of losing his temper and he might have done so if Queghan hadn’t remarked, with a placidity that was quite amazing, ‘Perhaps we know more than we suspect. The tapes are open to many levels of interpretation – so far we’ve taken them at face value.’
    â€˜Do they reveal the purpose of the machine?’ Dagon asked coldly.
    â€˜Not that I can see.’
    â€˜Do you know its purpose?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Then no progress has been made. Complete waste of time.’
    Blake kept his voice low and steady, under tight control. ‘You talk as though none of this information meant anything. Do you believe that? Do you think it’s worthless?’
    They were in one of the PSYCON soundproof labs with an audio-visual display linked to the VTR facility: for the third consecutive time they had watched and listened and made notes on the tapes produced during Queghan’s period of transmission. The quality of reception was excellent, though Dr Francis Dagon had remained resolutely unimpressed, and Blake was annoyed because he knew that Dagon didn’t regard the experiment as genuine or scientifically valid. He had more or less admitted this in commenting that mythographers wereblessed with unusually vivid imaginations, to which Queghan had smiled charmingly and thanked him for the compliment.
    In response to Blake’s question Dagon said, ‘If I thought the information totally without value I shouldn’t be here. My point is that the experiment has not elicited the information we were seeking. But it would seem I’m in a minority of one.’
    â€˜What about the Aleph?’ Blake said. ‘Isn’t that a piece of vital information? The Kabbalah makes no mention of it as far as I can recall.’
    â€˜Perhaps because it never existed,’ Dagon said blandly.
    â€˜You saw the tapes.’
    Dagon sucked at the air. ‘What I
saw?
’ he said, ‘was the visual interpretation of a neurological landscape. Our heads are filled with a million images and impressions which do not necessarily correspond to reality. How do we determine what has a basis in the real world and what has not? Fact or fancy, that seems to be the nub of the dilemma.’
    â€˜So the whole thing was imaginary,’ Milton Blake said, nodding his head rapidly. His face, dark and handsome, was sullen with anger. ‘That’s your considered opinion.’
    Queghan said, ‘Much of it had the quality of mythic experience that one would expect: medieval setting, mad alchemist who believes himself to be immortal, attractive wilful daughter, young novice come to learn the dark secrets of the magic arts. It only lacked a laboratory in the cellar with bubbling liquids and flashing blue sparks.’
    â€˜You’re forgetting a prime ingredient,’ Dagon said. Something gurgled down below and he waited a moment. ‘The shambling idiot of enormous strength who tries to destroy his creator; the stuff of pulp fiction.’
    â€˜I hadn’t forgotten him,’ Queghan said, looking at Blake.
    â€˜Then I take it that you agree – the tapes are only of marginal interest? If we don’t know what’s valid and what isn’t how can we proceed?’
    â€˜It depends on which scientific point of view you subscribe to. To a Myth Technologist the tapes are a source of valuable research data: the information is all there if we care to interpret them in the appropriate way. However,