Vail by Trevor Hoyle Page B

theoretical physics is actual philosophy’.’
    Two in one day. First a terrorist loonie and now a mad quantum mechanic. Which of us was going off our rocker, the world or me?
    â€˜Suppose I say I’m not going to do the favour, – will you still give me the
Temporal
?’
    â€˜That all depends on whether you do the favour or not.’
    â€˜But you won’t know till later.’
    â€˜So that’s when I’ll decide.’
    â€˜How can you decide later whether or not to give me the
Temporal
now?’
    â€˜Simple. I won’t have given it to you if you don’t do the favour and I will have given it to you if you have.’
    â€˜You call that simple?’
    â€˜Is to me, squire.’
    â€˜All right.’ I’d made up my mind. ‘Give me the
Temporal
and I’ll do you the favour, how’s that? Happy?’
    â€˜I thought you’d say that,’ he said, handing me the foil strip. ‘That’s more than I did.’
    He was gone, but the evidence that the boy or youth existed was in my hand. I had the
Temporal
. What good it would do remained to be seen. And whether or not I would do the favour ditto.
    I suspected that Brown had made love to Mira while I had been away but I had no means of corroborating it. At one time I might have got angry and flown into a jealous rage but now it hardly seemed worth the effort. And I could have been wrong. I didn’t want to appear foolish by accusing her of something she hadn’t done.
    By the time darkness came on we had passed Keele (Trusthouse Forte) and Hilton Park (Rank) and weren’t far from Corley (Trusthouse Forte) when the tedious petrol problem was upon us once again.
    To fill the mindless hours of driving, with my foot jammed hard against the accelerator, I used to imagine that Shakespeare was sitting next to me and I had the double pleasure of listening to his comments on this (to him) bizarre modern world and explaining to him such mysteries as the square iron boxes which apparently moved of their own volition but were actually powered by Engines burning a refined derivative of crude oil and the principle on which the steady baffling unflickering glow of the motorway lights on their fabricated steel stalks operated.
    He marvelled at the smoothness of the carriageways and the ultra neatness of everything. He could understand the signs with their arrows, numbers and other graphic symbols (though not the sign for the disabled, which he took to be a man sitting on a boulder) and after a little initial difficulty was able to read the place-names in their brutal modern script. Being a genius, much of it came as no real surprise to him, though what did surprise him was that while the external world had altered so drastically, being filled with unblemished concrete and moving iron boxes and unflickering illumination, human beings had hardly changed one whit: in fact physically they were exactly the same. He would have conjectured, he told me, that they would have advanced to keep pace with scientific progress, and almost expected to see forms of mutation such as puny hairless bodies and huge swollen brains. And what totally amazed him was when I explained that most people living today hadn’t the faintest notion of how the modern world functioned. They had heard at school and through themedia about scientific achievements and discoveries, and they used mechanical contrivances every day of their lives, yet few of them knew what these achievements and discoveries meant or of their importance, nor how the machines they depended on worked. As Shakespeare pointed out, most of them had the physical, mental and emotional attributes of people living in his own time. Indeed they might as well have been living in the Middle Ages, – preferably so, – because they were still several hundred years behind the times.
    I found these comments and conclusions interesting and spent many a pleasurable