Mission to Minerva

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Multiporter project was taking on characteristically Thurien dimensions. The original Quelsang transfer chamber, built to handle no more than tiny specks of matter to prove the principle, had been scaled up to the version contained in MP2, which could accommodate devices like communications relays and instrument probes. MP2 was now superseded in turn by MP3, otherwise known as the "Gate."

It took the form of a volume of space defined by an array of sixteen projection generators hanging at controlled positions a few hundred miles from MP2, which was where the control center for MP3 was located. They were called "bells," although each was more the shape of a tapered cylinder flaring at the wider end into a truncated hollow cone-a shape vaguely suggesting a common pattern of desk-lamp shade. In both diameter and length, however, the bells measured almost a thousand feet. The power to drive them came via the Thurien h-space grid. They were positioned and oriented in a spherical configuration that focused their outputs onto a central "transfer zone" a little over a half mile in diameter. This configuration was the "Gate" from which objects projected out across the Multiverse were launched. The Gate transfer zone was large enough to accommodate the Shapieron.

Experiments had not reached the stage of sending the Shapieron anywhere yet. The ship had been moved from Jevlen, however, and was currently being refitted at a construction and overhaul facility elsewhere in the Gistar system. At the same time, it was being equipped with its own M-space bubble generator, which later tests performed at MP2 had shown would be necessary for transferring objects significantly larger than simple instrument platforms and communications relays.

With such a smaller device, the elongated dumbbell bubble that suppressed convergence effects at the sending end, at the same time preventing dispersion while the projected object was stabilizing at the remote end, was created using energy supplied by the projector. However, this method would not be adequate for producing a remote-end lobe large enough to contain something the size of the Shapieron. The connecting "umbilical" filament couldn't be made to carry the load. Therefore, an additional source would be necessary at the remote end, and the obvious way to get it there seemed to be to build it into the transferred object itself.

The test "raft" centered in the Gate was a dummy structure half the size of the Shapieron, containing an instrument and sensor platform, and a duplicate installation of the Shapieron's intended on-board M-wave gear. It also carried a selection of plant and animal specimens for ascertaining the effects on biological processes. Hunt sat in the MP3 Control Center at MP2, taking in the situation from screens commanding the floor, plus VISAR-supplied avco visuals. He was here physically once more. There was no nonexistent observation room, complete with virtual bar, this time.

Almost a year had passed since the group's first arrival at Thurien. However, with acceptance of the new mission that Calazar had called for in his dramatic presentation to the Thurien Grand Assembly, the workload had not only intensified but widened, as everything that had been pieced together concerning Lunarian Minerva suddenly became relevant. On top, there had been Eesyan's insistence on reverifying the engineering from the ground up. Without Thurien methods and the computational resources of VISAR to back them up things, things would never have gotten even close to progressing this far.

All the same, most of the group had managed to fit in at least one trip back to Earth during this time. Sandy and Duncan had broadened the interpretation of their role of assisting Danchekker and Hunt to involving themselves with the Thuriens in analyzing as much as was known of Minervan history in the period leading up to its destruction, but at the same time managed to fit in a couple of weeks skiing in the Andes as well. Danchekker had spent most of the interim at Thurien immersed in his biological and philosophical pursuits, returning once or twice in response to summonses from Ms. Mulling involving official duties that he was unable to evade. Sonnebrandt was currently back there, having been called home on some family affair, and when he would be returning was as uncertain. Mildred had completed her researches and returned to Earth to work on her book, while Chien had not been back at all, but stayed on to follow the progress of construction at the MP3 Gate. She was the only other Terran present with Hunt at MP3 to observe the test.

In fact, Hunt's work had taken him back to Earth the most, involving long sessions with Caldwell to redefine Tramline's part in the new overall strategy. Caldwell was patched into the proceedings too, coming through from Earth in an avco window. Hunt was pretty sure that more had gone on behind the scenes to all this that involved Caldwell somehow. Caldwell was showing more interest in the day-to-day details than was usual for his kind of management style. Hunt had picked up rumors among the Thuriens that the vision with which Calazar had dazzled the Assembly owed much to Caldwell in its earliest stages of conception. But when Hunt tried to raise the subject out of curiosity, Caldwell had been evasive. Hunt knew from long experience that when Caldwell decided he didn't want to talk about an issue, that was the end of the matter.

Since Minerva at the time the mission was aimed at had been inhabited by human Lunarians, it had been agreed humans should be included in the team to be sent on it. Anyone suggesting otherwise would have had a tough time dealing with Hunt and the others who had been there from the beginning, in any case. Caldwell had made it clear that no one among them needed to feel any commitment to the new mission, but the thought of not going hadn't entered any of their heads. As was to be expected, when the news went around back on Earth, various other interests had made their presence felt, wanting to get in on the act and send people too. But they would have been negative assets, resented as an intrusion into the team. Caldwell was alive to the mood, and since disruptions at this point would have compromised the effectiveness of his people who were on the spot, he took it as part of his business to mount defenses on the home front. Hunt could only conclude that in this Caldwell was fully successful, since none of the wrangling and background politics had percolated through to Thurien.

The object of the present experiment was to send the test raft to a marked alternate reality of the Multiverse, and then bring it back-a pretty important prerequisite to have mastered if they were going to be sending Thuriens and Terrans. It was still not possible to "map" the Multiverse in terms of the attributes pertaining to a particular reality, for example, "A universe where Genghis Khan wasn't recalled after defeating the Prussian defenders of Europe, overran the West, and the dominant civilization that arose to colonize the world was Asiatic." No ready way had been found to connect "change," as perceived subjectively in the countless directions making up the Multiverse, with anything that could be measured as physics; indeed, whether such a connection existed at all was by no means certain. VISAR had been trying to refine the concept of "affinity," which yielded rough measure of how far a different reality was from the familiar one, but it could be notoriously unspecific when it came to indicating how they were different. A universe where Earth had no Moon, one in which Mars still possessed oceans, and another where Jupiter was missing two of its principal satellites all registered comparable affinity indexes. Why this should be, nobody even had a theory. At this stage it was impossible to say if sense would ever be made of it.

The affinity index was useful nevertheless in that it provided a crude way of marking off the swathe of Multiverse in which realities possessing a certain family resemblance-the Minerva of fifty thousand years previously, for example-were likely to lie. The approach was a bit like highlighting a newspaper ad with a tar brush, but in a situation where it reduced possible solutions numbered at "almost-infinity" by an amount "almost-infinity-minus something," the result was a problem that VISAR could generally find manageable. In short, while it wasn't possible to hit a specific target by its characteristics, they could usually lob a shell onto more or less the right continent.

Given some indication by the data fed back of where and when they were within those limits, the technique then was to try and hop the device closer by sending it a series of corrections. The corrections didn't always have the expected effect, but correlating the directives sent with the result returned was producing the fragments that it was hoped would one day connect together into a map. But nobody yet knew what the scale was, and to make matters worse the scale seemed to vary in every one of innumerable directions. VISAR said it was nice to have something challenging to do.

The voice of the Thurien supervisor directing the operation came over the local circuit. "Beacon lock-on is holding steady. Bell distributor drawing h-input and charging. Drone wave function registering on all matrixes. Pilot beam synched." An exchange of numbers and status checks with VISAR followed. It meant that the raft out in the Gate was ready to go, and the array of projectors positioned in space around it was almost up to power. The "beacon" was for VISAR to home the raft on-a probe that had been sent through about thirty minutes previously to a fairly "nearby" location in the Multiverse that could be identified with some confidence. A fix from the returned astronomical observations and intercepted Thurien communications signals put it about a half million miles from an unremarkable planet of one of Gistar's neighboring systems, and several months in the past.

"Well, with luck we'll soon know if you were right," Hunt said to Chien. The test involved an aspect of the return-wave that she and some of the Thuriens had been investigating. An object was brought back by reversing the projection process-effectively creating a progression of wave representations in the return direction. It had been demonstrated successfully with a series of small objects sent via the old MP2 chamber. The raft would be the first attempt with a larger body, using the Gate.

"Being sure about the part that gets us home again is something that interests me greatly," she replied dryly.

"Vic, by the way," Caldwell said from his window in Hunt's head. "Owen stopped by to visit today. Asked me to say hi. He was hoping to be in on this too, but he couldn't stay." The test had been postponed a couple of hours due to some last-minute changes out at the Gate.

"That's too bad," Hunt said. "How's he liking retirement?"

"Doing okay. Catching up on his reading and traveling, he says, and still thinking about writing that book about his UNSA days. But I think he misses the firm. Did I ever tell you I thought about retiring too around a year or two ago?"

Hunt's eyebrows arched in surprise. "No, you never did. Seriously?"

"Sure. It was touch and go. Maeve talked me out of it in the end. I think she was terrified of the thought of having me under her feet all day, every day. I'm glad she did. I think I was going through a-"

VISAR cut in "Excuse me, but Bytor is asking to have a word with Gregg." Bytor was one of Thurien engineers assisting near the supervisor's panel.

"Back in a second, Vic."

"Sure."

Caldwell vanished. Hunt returned his attention to the screens. The views from the raft's imagers showed the sixteen projector bells as disks of blue-violet light spaced around in all directions against the background of stars, with MP2 showing as a bright light on one view and the distant globe of Thurien beyond. The Thuriens around the Control Center sat intent at their tasks. By now, nobody expected any real surprises. Hunt reflected on how quickly even something like this, which a year ago would have been viewed as outlandish, could come to be accepted as routine. The countdown was approaching zero.

"Sequencing out… Transferring."

And the gate was empty. That was it. There were no spectacular effects. One moment the raft had been there, centered at the focus of the array pattern, and then it was gone-across several light-years of space and several months back in time, if all was according to plan.

"Looks like another good one," Chien said, her eyes busy taking in displays and numbers.

"And we're sitting here getting ho-hum about it. Do you realize how staggering this all is, really?" Hunt shook his head.

VISAR confirmed that the data link to the raft was functioning. The readings coming back showed that it had found the beacon. Moments later, a visual channel opened up, showing an altered view of stars and space, this time without any bells, no MP2, and a planet that wasn't Thurien, farther away and smaller.

"There it is." Chien indicated with a nod. The beacon was coming into view in another shot, riding at a distance that VISAR reported as being eleven miles.

"We're probably causing some excitement there already," Hunt said. There could be no hiding something the size of the raft from the Thurien monitoring system of whatever universe they had connected with-not that there was any particular reason to want to hide it. In fact, quite the contrary.

Caldwell popped back into his visual field. "It's looking good. The raft got there," he said.

Hunt nodded. "Seems like it, Gregg."

"Access established. We're presenting our calling card," VISAR informed the company. It meant that via the raft's communications relay, it was in contact with its counterpart-the VISAR that existed in the target universe. In fact, this was one of the more valuable parts of the exercise. Instead of having to decode its way into an unfamiliar system, this way it was able to transfer enormous volumes of information describing the reality the raft was in. After a series of repeat performances with probes, they were no longer initiating person-to-person contacts. The routine had gotten old, and the individuals on the receiving end were usually too dumbfounded to supply much in the way of anything useful enough to be worth the time.

"Wow!" VISAR didn't often insert exclamations. "You're lucky you weren't with this outfit. They didn't power down at Quelsang and move the action out to MP2. There was a major accident-sounds like a matter clash. It took out half the Institute. The group was wiped out except for Danchekker and Mildred, who weren't there. I've given them our records, but I don't know if it will do any good. Their whole project is shut down. It's causing a major political scandal all over Thurien and back at Earth."

"Jeez!" Caldwell murmured. Hunt could only whistle silently, too taken aback to form any words.

"Eesyan permitted it?" Chien said, sounding surprised and a little disbelieving.

"It seems their Eesyan resigned from the program early on," VISAR replied. "There were disagreements… Pressures from Earth that he wouldn't go along with."

"Don't tell me, I can guess," Caldwell said. "My other self there is about to be fired, right?"

"You're not there," VISAR answered. "You took an early retirement over a year ago."

The supervisor announced, "Wave pattern is stable. Switching over to local control now."

"Link deactivated to standby. Bubble manifold dissolving," another voice reported.

This was the crucial part of the experiment. The transfer of power through from the Gate had been cut. The bubble of local M-space and its extension forming the umbilical to the raft's locally generated bubble was no longer being sustained. The raft was now a self-contained entity, free to move around in the foreign universe, all communications severed. It simulated the situation that would exist with the Shapieron when it was sent back to Minerva. The blank screens and inactive readouts confirmed that all information flow back from the raft had ceased. The homing beacon that had been sent ahead, on the other hand, was still connected to the projector at MP2 via its own umbilical and sending back a view of the raft, captured telescopically from about fifty miles away.

The beacon would play a crucial role in bringing the raft back. Multiverse navigation was still far too much of an inexact business for VISAR to be sure of finding the same place again by aiming blind. "Place" meant not only a given point in space at a some moment in time, but also a particular variant among countless shades of "likeness," and tests had shown that repeating what appeared to be the same parameters was no guarantee of returning to the same one; in fact, it had never yet succeeded in doing so once. But having an active beacon already there gave VISAR something to "home" on-hence, its name. The schedule called for a five-minute pause before they attempted reestablishing contact. Around the room, Thuriens were leaning back into more relaxed positions, stretching, and turning to talk to others.

"Oh, and I meant to tell you," Caldwell said. "We've had Lieutenant Polk bugging us here again."

"From the feds? You're kidding."

"He found out you were back just recently. Now I'm in trouble. Seems I should have notified them. Talk to them or do something, will you, Vic? Get him off my back."

"Okay. But I'll need to figure out what angle to take on it," Hunt promised.

Formaflex had recently gone public after a trial of marketing a method of duplicating objects using Thurien scanning and nano-assembler technology. They claimed that they were limiting the process to areas that couldn't be tackled profitably by conventional methods, but the manufacturing sector saw it as the thin end of a wedge and were panicking. The rise of Formaflex's stock price had set records, which of course was what the original tip had been about. Hunt didn't think he would have passed anything comparable on in like manner himself, even without the trouble he had experienced. He could only conclude that there was at least one version of himself loose in the Multiverse somewhere that had even less of a head for the world of finance than he did.

"You know it will spread," Chien commented. It was a topic she returned to regularly. "Earth is going to have to adapt to Thurien values eventually. The money system is designed to tally the checks and balances of a zero-sum economy. Every credit in one book has to be balanced by a debit somewhere else. But once Thurien technology is introduced, the exchange of material goods that the system assumes ceases to be the dominant factor. Their wealth lies in their knowledge, which is subject to a different arithmetic. Sharing what you have doesn't lose you anything. The more that's given, the richer everyone gets. The sum is an exponential growth."

"I don't think Wall Street is quite ready for that yet, Chien," Hunt said.

"It's going to have to learn. The genie is coming out of the bottle."

"I think Maeve already understands it," Caldwell told them.

Hunt realized that consternation was breaking out among the Thuriens. "Vic!" Chien exclaimed at the same time. He followed her gaze back to the screen showing the transmission coming back from the beacon. The most extraordinary thing was happening. Where there had been simply the image of the raft floating in space against the background of stars, now there were two rafts. Even as he watched, one of them vanished, then reappeared moments later in a different position. Then there were three rafts; then nothing at all.

As the chaotic pattern continued, voices among the Thuriens called for the test to be aborted. But Chien cut in on avco, addressing the Controller. "It started as soon as the connection was broken. Try restoring it."

Several seconds went by while he wrestled with the decision. Then, "We'll try it. Power the bubble back up." The Gate bubble was restored and projected using the homing information provided by the beacon. After a couple of corrections, the screens feeding from the raft came to life again. At the same time the view of the raft being sent by the beacon stabilized. Five minutes elapsed, ten… No further sign of the problem appeared.

"We will continue as scheduled," the Controller announced. The last part was to bring the raft back again. It went without a hitch. The bells were brought up to full power, VISAR initiated the reversed phase sequence, and seconds later the raft reappeared in the Gate, looking as if it had never left. The views from it showed the universe as seen from MP3 again. In the cages, the animals were scampering about, feeding, scratching, or just sitting lost on their own brooding, all as if nothing had happened.

Clearly, what had been observed was some kind of timeline convergence effect. Hitherto, convergence had been a phenomenon occurring in the vicinity of multiporting projectors, such as the Quelsang prototype and the scaled-up chamber at MP2. But there was no projector on the raft. It carried only instrumentation and communications gear, and the test model of the onboard bubble generator intended for the Shapieron. Lots of probes fitted for instrumentation and communications tasks had been sent over many months without anything like this happening before. So the effect had to be caused by the onboard bubble generator. But it had only happened when the umbilical connecting back to the Gate-end bubble was severed. This suggested that it was a consequence of something that was inhibited while the bubble existed in its double-ended dumbbell form.

Further experiments were performed using observer probes fitted with MV-wave analyzers to monitor events around the raft from close quarters. It was found that the core region of the Gate bubble, inside which the projector-end convergence zone was trapped, also extended as a thin filament inside the umbilical to the far end. Here, it formed a convergence lobe inside the remote-end bubble too, but as long as the two bubbles were connected, a "tension" between them kept it down to a small core region-so much so that its existence hadn't even been suspected before.

However, when the Gate-end was deactivated, the onboard power source at the raft end expanded the remote bubble and its core convergence zone to produce bizarre observable effects. The solution was to deactivate the remote bubble as soon as the projected standing wave had stabilized and was unable to disperse. While the precise physics was still to be worked out, repeated tests showed the method to be reliable. An interesting point to note in the course of all this was that they had believed the convergence problem to be solved, gone ahead accordingly to the next step of sending instrumented probes equipped for communication back, and then discovered that convergence was a more subtle business than they had thought. This perhaps explained the episode of the similarly conceived device from another reality that had precipitated the virtual craziness a while back, which had puzzled Hunt.

Figure 2.

(A) Quelsang prototype. See p. 132.

(B) MP2 bubble contains convergence, but dispersion of test object not eliminated. See p. 208.

(C) Extended bubble prevents dispersion. See p. 209.

(D) Detached bubble. Onboard power drives expansion of bubble and remote-end convergence zone. See p. 250.

(E) Collapsing of remote bubble after stabilization eliminates convergence. See p. 252.