Mission to Minerva

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

VISAR had abandoned its attempts to solve the convergence problem by generating a "quantum signature" unique to a particular universe, by means of which other universes could effectively be locked out. Although the concept was sound enough, it turned out that the amount of information needed to define a stable zone increased exponentially with the size of the zone. This meant that beyond trivial experiments that had little value other than to demonstrate the principle, the amount of calculation necessary to achieve a realistic operating volume capable of supporting anything worthwhile rose rapidly toward infinity, taxing the capacity of even something like VISAR. The Thurien mathematicians held hopes they might find some form of short-cut or algorithm that would render the problem tractable, but they were the first to admit that as of now they had no clear idea of what they were looking for, and the search for a solution, if one existed at all, could well take years.

The breakthrough came from a completely unexpected direction that didn't involve mathematicians or advanced theoreticians at all, but space propulsion engineers. Thurien spacecraft operated by an advanced form of the drive employed in the Shapieron, going back to the early days of Ganymean Minerva, whereby the ship was carried inside a propagating "bubble" of distorted spacetime. Whereas modern Thurien vessels drew their power from the interstellar grid beamed through h-space, the Shapieron used its own onboard generators. Some of Eesyan's group had been looking into the separate problem of maintaining coherence of the standing wave that defined an object projected out across the Multiverse, hence halting it. The method worked, but it was unstable. After a brief existence ranging so far from fractions of a second to a minute or so, the wave would break up-not observed directly, but inferred from observations of objects arriving from other universes that had done so in this one.

Eesyan's scientists had approached the space-drive designers to find out more about how this bubble was created, their thought being that something like it might be contrived to contain the standing wave pattern in such a way that would prevent it from dispersing. It seemed, when they looked into it, that adapting the technique to M-space should be fairly straightforward-it involved a longitudinal form of the same type of wave that the engineers had long experience of dealing with. But when preliminary experiments were run at Quelsang to investigate the creation of M-space bubbles, a completely unexpected result was observed.

An M-space bubble apparently kept time-line convergences contained, restricting them to the inside. Even when Eesyan gave approval for the machine's power to be cautiously increased to a level where convergences had occurred outside the transfer chamber before, nothing was detected. Tests showed that the effect was still there, but confined inside the bubble sitting in the center of the chamber. Outside, the chaos of events and objects with different past histories all being present at the same time and place was eliminated. Nobody was quite sure how this came about, which would no doubt provide the theoreticians with another area of contention that that might keep them occupied for years. But it wasn't the first time, either for Thuriens or for Terrrans, that a practical solution to a problem had preceded the appearance of an elegant theory explaining why it worked.

So the convergence problem was apparently solved-or at least, acceptably contained. When the bubble was combined with the transfer wave function as part of the pattern projected across the Multiverse, it turned out that it did indeed achieve the original aim of confining dispersion as well. So an object sent into another universe could now be induced to remain there.

Creating a bubble required a considerable input of energy. Suitable sources couldn't be carried in the tiny test objects used in the Quelsang experiments, or even the probes being projected from MP2, which were still little more than compact signaling beacons. The method developed, therefore, was to stretch the bubble created at the projector to suppress time line convergence into an elongated filament that the projected wave function expanded at the far end to enclose the test object as well. The bubble thus took an extended dumbbell form of two contained zones connected by a filament that carried the energy to sustain the surface at the far end. When bubble experiments were performed on the transmitters being projected from MP2, it was found that the filament also acted as a conduit for the signal sent back, which if intercepted outside the trapped convergence zone, could be decoded coherently. The filaments were dubbed "umbilicals."

The nice thing about it all was that once the object had consolidated and stabilized, the energy previously fed through to maintain the pattern was no longer required, and the bubble could be switched off. It "really" existed there, in the other universe, and although there was no way of testing it yet, theory indicated that it should thereafter be capable of interacting independently with its surroundings and moving around in them freely.

Although an exemplary achievement, all this was still akin to firing an artillery shell blind and knowing it had landed somewhere. To say where would require knowing something about the surroundings and circumstances that it had landed in. But at least the scientists were now in a position to decode intelligibly any information that was sent back. The next step would be to project objects large enough and complex enough to send back more than just an identification code.

It was something like a reversed form of deja vu. There was the eerie feeling of having been through this before, but this time Hunt was on the other side of it.

He sat in the tower block lab, surrounded by exotically styled equipment, getting used again to the experience that he realized had become unfamiliar, of looking at a hard screen that was really there in front of him. The Thuriens hardly ever used them. What was the point in constructing hardware when the same effect could be generated more easily and with more versatility inside the viewer's head? But for these tests the Thurien scientists had wanted to be sure of capturing exactly what was seen and heard at the far end of the connection.

A half dozen or so of them sat or stood around the room, waiting and watching curiously. The Terrans were there too, with the exceptions of Danchekker, who was meeting with some Thurien philosophers to discuss his theory of consciousness, which he was still developing, and Mildred, away on one of her excursions into the city. The terminal was linked to the MP2 facility, several hundred thousand miles away, which was now fitted with its own internal bubble generator to contain convergence effects. With convergence suppressed, a small staff of researchers and technicians had been installed at MP2 to prepare the various configurations of instruments being despatched. However, the data transmissions back from the instruments were usually relayed to Thurien for monitoring and analysis.

VISAR reported, "The probe platform is stabilizing." On the screen, an image formed of stars in a black background of space. Murmurs came from around the room. Some of the occupants moved closer behind Hunt, although the screen content was being copied neurally via avco. The view slid by as instruments on the probe scanned their surroundings. Earth appeared from an upper corner, showing the Atlantic hemisphere, and moved toward the center, bringing the Moon into view as a three-quarter crescent on one side.

"Right on!" a Thurien voice approved somewhere nearby.

"It makes me feel quite homesick," Sonnebrandt said to nobody in particular.

VISAR announced, hardly necessarily, "Target location is confirmed. It's where we wanted it to be. Starfield distribution and positions of visible planets are consistent with specified time frame.

"Unbelievable!" Chien whispered.

VISAR again: "And we're picking up communications. Processing for system codes and message protocols. This may take a few seconds."

Duncan: "I'd thought we were still months away from anything like this."

Sandy: "These guys are good."

A Thurien: "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Another Thurien: "What does that mean?"

"An Earth saying that my children picked up. Like it?"

VISAR's previous efforts to construct quantum signatures had turned out to be not entirely fruitless. Although failing to achieve the original purpose, the logic of groups and sets that they were based on provided the basis for a method of "mapping" the Multiverse by space and time coordinates, and introducing a measure of "affinity" that could be derived from a virtually an unlimited number of dimensions and grew less as universes became progressively more "different." Exactly in what kind of way they were different, and how rapidly that varied, could only be determined by sending things to various places, trying to make sense of what they found there, and calibrating the results to some kind of scale. The task was probably in a similar league to that of a medieval cartographer of village streets and farms setting out to map the world, and would probably take years to develop into a working, quantitative science, if not generations. But, as with Shakespeare and the alphabet or Beethoven and the basic inversions of C major, everything had to start somewhere. Hunt was amazed that from all the unthinkable permutations and variants making up the Multiverse, they were able to come anywhere near this close at all.

For he was not looking just at the familiar Earth, twenty light-years away across space, that they had come from. It was Earth-an Earth-as it had been, if the crude scaling factors that represented the best that could be achieved so far were to be believed, a little less than six months previously. That would put it at not long before the Tramline group's departure-assuming that anything of such a nature had happened, or was even possible, on the world they were looking at. But the fact that they were picking up recognizable communications traffic meant that at least it wasn't a version of Earth that had blown itself up in one of the twentieth century's fits of paranoia or never managed to get beyond windmills and horses in the first place.

"London, Paris, Lisbon, Boston, New York, Rio de Janeiro are all where they should be and looking normal," VISAR reported. "We have indications of lunar bases. Lots of comsats in the synchronous belt." He shouldn't be so amazed, really, Hunt reflected. They had set the parameters that they thought determined the affinity to be pretty close. But even so, it was amazing.

"I think you might be about to go on stage, Vic," Duncan called across.

"Okay, we're into a comnet trunk beam," VISAR told them. "This is looking good. Library structure and directory listings look familiar. UNSA is there… Advanced Sciences at Goddard, yes… Dr. Victor Hunt, Deputy Director, Physics. You didn't get hit by a truck. Temporal calibration is not bad: We're within five days. Do we go with it?"

There was no reason to doubt it, but etiquette required Eesyan to confirm. "Carry on." He was patched in from somewhere in Thurios.

"Call is connecting…"

Hunt felt a curious mixture of feelings: excitement; still more than a little incredulity; a delicious sense of impending mischief that the Thuriens didn't quite seem to understand but went along with; the tension that came with a glimmer of fear that it might still all mess up now. "Think I'll get an encore?" he asked Duncan, who was now a couple of feet away.

And then the view on the screen changed to show… none other than Duncan Watt! The Duncan next to Hunt froze, unable to do more than stare. Hunt waited for a reaction. "Yes, Vic?" A bit anticlimactic, Hunt had to admit. Then the face on the screen knotted in puzzlement. "There's a Thurien behind you. What's going on?"

"Wait till you see who's next to me." Hunt motioned for the nearer Duncan to move into the viewing angle. And Duncan ruined Hunt's act. He had read the transcript of Hunt's original encounter with his own alter ego enough times to know it by heart. Hunt had been saving the line for his other self in this universe-assuming they found him. But Duncan stole it!

"I suppose this must come as a bit of a shock."

Alter-Duncan stared back blankly. He didn't seem able to find any words. Nobody had really expected that he would. "It would take a lot of explaining," Hunt said. "But to give you a hint, think of the work that the Thuriens are doing right now, if my guess is right, to unravel what went on when Broghuilio and his bunch got catapulted across the Multiverse. Let's just say for now that we here are a little way ahead of you. Getting the drift?" The image, still glassy-eyed, managed to return a stupefied nod. "Good. In a nutshell, we've projected a relay into orbit there that's hooked into the comnet and is converting to Multiverse language. A data package should have transferred itself with this call that goes into it all. But while we're through, I was hoping to talk to me; that is 'your' me. Is he around?… Duncan, come on, snap out of it. You have to be prepared for some weird stuff if you're going to mess around with this kind of thing. Believe me, it gets worse. Pay particular attention to the part that talks about convergences. Is Vic around there anywhere?"

Duncan found his voice finally, "He's over in ALS… with Chris Danchekker."

"Put me through, then, would you? There's a good chap. Sorry it couldn't have been longer. Just saying hi as a courtesy, really."

"Yes. Of course… Er… I'll put you through."

"See you around," the calling-end Duncan said automatically, then thought about it. "Well, probably not, actually."

In setting up a file giving the background information, they had prepared themselves better than seemed to have been the case with the group the original Hunt had represented. But then again, that group looked as it had still been working on the stability issue and so perhaps they hadn't been worried about the finer points just yet.

Sandy Holmes took the call in Danchekker's lab over in Alien Life Sciences. She stared uncertainly out from the screen for a second or two, jerked her head around to look back over her shoulder, then at the screen again. "What is this?" she muttered half to herself. "A recording? Is it some kind of joke? Hey, guys, who is this?"

"No, not a recording or a joke. it's me, Vic," Hunt said. "I'm looking for Vic."

He could read Sandy's mind: The image is interacting. He's real. She wrestled with the conundrum, gave up, and turned her head again. "Chris, Vic… Come and look at this." The Sandy watching from a few feet behind Duncan just smiled. She didn't try to muscle in by repeating Duncan's routine of a minute earlier. There would be plenty more times. Two more faces appeared on the screen: Hunt, matter-of-fact; Danchekker looking irritable, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of something. "It's not a recording," Sandy informed them. "It interacts."

"Yes, it does. Try me," Hunt offered.

Danchekker blinked rapidly several times through his spectacles, then turned to the Hunt who was with him, "What kind of stunt is this, Vic? If it has a point, I'm afraid it eludes me. We really do have a lot to get through."

The other Hunt shook his head helplessly. "No, honestly, Chris, I don't know any more than you do. It's got nothing to…" He looked back from the screen as an answer suggested itself. "It has to be a VISAR creation. VISAR, are you in on this? What's the idea?"

"I am, but only as the phone operator. It isn't a creation," VISAR's voice replied on the circuit. In an aside voice that was clearly for local ears only, it inquired, "Do you want me to tell him?"

"Sure," Hunt said.

"It's you. Or another one of you, that is. We're plugged into your comnet from orbit from Thurien. Another Thurien, that is."

Hunt could almost hear the thoughts racing through his other self's head. "A Multiverse version?" the image said finally. "MV cross-communication? Does that mean you've cracked it?"

Cheers and applause came from all around. VISAR showed a copy of the panned view it was sending through of the room full of Thuriens and Terrans.

"Extraordinary!" Danchekker pronounced weakly.

The subsequent exchange followed roughly the lines it had with Duncan, but going into a little more detail.

The package of technical data was just a gift thrown in as a goodwill gesture. The people in the universe sending it could derive no benefit, since they of course possessed the information already. The real purpose of this series of tests, which would visit other versions of both Earth and Thurien, and of which this was just a beginning, would be for VISAR to extract as much reference information as it could collect describing the universe that the probe had arrived in-physical characteristics; geography; history; political and social organization; technology; arts; customs; anything that could be accessed in the time available. By correlating the results of many such searches with the settings programmed in at the projector, it was hoped to build up an enormous database that would enable the "affinity" parameter to be interpreted in more everyday-meaningful terms. The phone chat really wasn't necessary. In fact, most of the planned tests omitted it. It could only get repetitive, and the novelty would doubtless wear off very quickly. But in the meantime, the impulse to try a few just to see the results had been irresistible. It also explained, perhaps, why the original alter-ego of Hunt had been so agreeably chatty.

Hunt refrained from saying anything about investment tips for Jerry Santello. It looked as if his other self was going to have more than enough to think about. And besides, he wasn't really that sure himself what the Formaflex business was all about.

Now that it was possible to identify where and when a projected probe had arrived at, this series of tests also enabled another prediction of Multiverse theory to be verified. An intriguing thought that had occurred to everybody involved was that sending probes ahead in time to closely related universes sounded like the next best thing to being able to read the future. The energy balance equations, however, said it wasn't quite so simple. The resolution of uncertainty that events unfolding in the forward direction of time represented took form in the second law of thermodynamics, expressed as increasing entropy. Multiverse physics related entropy and energy in such a way that projecting into another universe required more and more energy as the time of the target reality came closer to "now" at the sending end, becoming infinite when the time difference became zero. In other words, an energy barrier seemed to exist that precluded peeking into the future. Whether that too might be broken one day, no one was prepared to say or even guess. The tests at MP2 confirmed, however, that the restriction was very real for the time being.

True, the transmissions from probes projected back in time were traveling across the Multiverse and into their future. But the MV equations talked about the projection energy of the defining wave function, not the subsequent flow of signal energy and information. In their case this had been supplied from the sending end.