He was back in the recliner inside one of the cubicles in the ship that had landed at McClusky.
Everything seemed very quiet and still. He rose to his feet and moved out into the corridor to peer into the adjacent cubicle. Lyn was still there, lying back in the recliner looking relaxed, her eyes closed and her face serene. He looked down and noticed for the first time that, like her, he was wearing UNSA arctic clothing again. He moved along to inspect the other cubicles and found all the others were there too, looking much the same.
"Take a walk outside and check it out," visar's voice suggested. "We'll still be here when you get back."
Hunt made his way to the door at the forward end of the corridor, stopped for a moment and braced himself for anything, and stepped through into the antechamber. McClusky and Alaska were back again. Through the open outer door he could see figures stirring and starting to move forward as they saw him. He moved toward the door, and seconds later was on his feet at the bottom of the access stairway. The figures converged around him, and excited questions assailed him from all sides as he began walking across the apron toward the mess hall.
"What's happening in there?"
"Are there Ganymeans inside?"
"Are they coming out?"
"How many of them are there?"
"Just . . . talking so far. What? Yes . . . well, sort of. I'm not sure. Look, give me a few minutes. I need to check something."
Inside the mess hall he made straight for the control room, set up in one of the front rooms. The controller and his two operators had watched Hunt through the window that looked out across the apron and were waiting expectantly. "Vic, how's it going?" the controller greeted as he came in the door.
"Fine," Hunt murmured absently. He stared hard at the consoles and screens set up around the room and forced his mind to go back over what had happened since they entered the craft. What he was seeing right now was real. Everything around him was real. The phone call had been part of something that hadn't been real. Obviously it couldn't have worked the other way around; reality couldn't communicate into the realm of the hallucinatory via radio. Obviously?
"Have you had any contact from that plane since we went inside?" he asked, turning to glance at the control-room crew.
"Why . . . yes." The controller looked suddenly worried. "You talked to us yourself a few minutes ago. You're sure everything's . . . all right?"
Hunt brought a hand up to massage his brow and give the confusion boiling inside his head time to die down a little. "How did you get through?" he asked.
"We got a signal from it earlier telling us we could couple in via a low-power beam, like I told you. I just asked for you by name."
"Do it again," Hunt said.
The controller moved in front of the supervisory console, tapped a command, and spoke toward the two-way audio grille above the main screen. "McClusky Control to alien. Alien vessel, come in please."
"Acknowledged," a voice answered.
"visar?" Hunt said, recognizing it.
"Hi again. Convinced now?"
Hunt's eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he stared at the blank screen. At last the wheels of his brain felt as if they were sorting themselves out and lining themselves up on the right axles again. There was one obvious thing for him to try. "Put me through to Lyn Garland," he said.
"One moment."
The screen came to life, and a second later Lyn was looking out at him, framed by the background of the room he had recently been in. It must have been equally clear that Hunt was calling from McClusky, but her face did not register undue surprise. visar must have been doing some explaining.
"You sure get around," she commented drily.
A shadow of a smile formed on Hunt's face as the first glimmer of light began showing through it all. "Hi," he said. "Question: What happened after I last talked to you?"
"You vanished into thin air—just like that. It gave me a bit of a fright, but visar's been straightening me out about a lot of things." She held up a hand and wriggled her fingers in front of her face, at the same time shaking her head wonderingly. "I can't believe I'm not really doing this. It's all happening inside my head? It's incredible!"
Right at that moment she probably knew more about what was going on than he did, Hunt reflected. But he thought he had the general idea now. An instant communications link to Thurien . . . miracles worked to order . . . Ganymeans talking in English. . . . And what had visar called that vessel—the perceptron? The pieces started dropping into place.
"Just keep talking to visar," he said. "I'll be back in a few minutes." Lyn smiled the kind of smile that said she knew everything would work out okay; Hunt winked, then cut off the screen.
"Would you mind telling us what's going on?" the controller asked. "I mean . . . we're only supposed to be running this operation."
"Just give me a second," Hunt said, entering the code to reactivate the channel. He turned his face toward the grille. "visar?"
"You rang?"
"That place we walked out of the perceptron into—does it exist, or did you invent it?"
"It exists. It's part of a place called Vranix, which is an old city on Thurien."
"Did we see it the way it is right now?"
"Yes, you did."
"So you have to be relaying instantly between here and Thurien."
"You're getting the idea."
Hunt thought for a second. "What about the room with the carpet?"
"I invented that. A special effect—faked. We thought that maybe some familiar-looking surroundings would help you get used to how we do things. Figured the rest out yet?"
"I'll try a long shot," Hunt said. "How about total sensory stimulation and monitoring, plus an instant commu- nications link. We never went to Thurien; you brought Thurien here. And Lyn never answered any phone call. You pumped it straight into her nervous system along with everything else she thinks she's doing, and you manufactured all the appropriate AV data to send through the local beam. How's that?"
"Pretty good," visar replied, managing to inject a strong note of approval into its voice. "So are you ready to rejoin the party? You're due to meet the Thuriens in a few minutes."
"I'll talk to you later," Hunt said, and cut the connection.
"Now would you mind telling us what the hell this is all about?" the controller invited.
Hunt's expression was distant, his voice slow and thoughtful. "That's just a flying phone booth out there on the apron. It's got equipment inside that somehow couples directly into the perceptual parts of the nervous system and transfers a total impression from a remote place. What you saw on the screen a minute ago was extracted straight out of Lyn's mind. A computer translated it into audiovisual modulations on a signal beam and directed it into your antenna. It processed the transmission from here in the opposite direction."
Ten minutes later Hunt reentered the perceptron and sat down in the same recliner that he had occupied before. "What do I say—'Home, James'?" he asked aloud.
This time there were no preliminary sensory disturbances. He was instantly back in the room with Lyn, who seemed to have been expecting him to reappear; visar had evidently forewarned her. He looked around the room curiously to see if he could detect any hint of its being a creation manufactured by a computer, but there was nothing. Every detail was authentic. It was uncanny. As with visar's command of English and the data needed to disguise the perceptron as a Boeing, all the information must have been extracted from Earth's communications links; practically everything necessary had been communicated electronically from somewhere at some time or another. No wonder the Thuriens had been particular about keeping everything connected with this business out of the network!
He reached out and ran a finger experimentally down Lyn's arm. It felt warm and solid. The whole thing was exactly what he had said to visar—a total sensory stimulation process, probably acting on the brain centers directly and bypassing the neural inputs. It was astounding.
Ly
n glanced down at his hand, then looked up and eyed him suspiciously. "I don't know if it's that authentic, either," she told him. "And right now I'm not that curious. Forget it."
Before Hunt could reply, the phone rang again. He answered it. It was Danchekker, looking ready to commit mayhem.
"This is monstrous! Outrageous!" The veins at his temples were throbbing visibly. "Have you any idea of the provocation to which I have been subjected? Where are you in this computerized lunatic asylum? What kind of—"
"Hold it, Chris. Calm down." Hunt held up a hand. "It's not as bad as you think. All that's—"
"Not as bad? Where in God's name are we? How do we get out of it? Have you talked to the others? By what right do these alien creatures presume to—"
"You're not anywhere, Chris. You're still on the ground at McClusky. So am I. We all are. What's happened is—"
"Don't be preposterous! It's quite evident that—"
"Have you talked to visar? It'll explain it all far better than I can. Lyn's with me and—"
"No I have not, and what's more I have no intention of doing anything of the kind. If these Thuriens do not possess the common courtesy to—"
Hunt sighed. "visar, take the professor home and straighten him out, could you. I don't think I'm up to dealing with him right now."
"I'll handle it," visar replied, and Danchekker promptly vanished from the screen leaving an empty room in the frame.
"Amazing," Hunt murmured. There were times, he thought, when he would have liked to be able to pull that stunt with Danchekker himself.
A knock sounded lightly on the door. Hunt and Lyn's heads jerked around to look at it, turned back to meet each other's questioning looks, then stared at the door again. Lyn shrugged and moved across the room toward it. Hunt switched off the terminal and looked up to find the eight-foot-tall figure of a Ganymean straightening up after ducking through the doorway. Lyn stood speechless with surprise as she held the door open.
"Dr. Hunt and Miss Garland," the Ganymean said. "First, on behalf of all of us, I apologize for the somewhat bizarre welcome. It was necessary for some very important reasons, which will be explained when we all get together very shortly. I hope that our leaving you on your own like this hasn't seemed too bad-mannered, but we thought that perhaps a short period of adjustment might be beneficial. I am Porthik Eesyan—one of those you were expecting to meet."
Chapter Ten
Eesyan was subtly different in form from the Ganymeans of the Shapieron, Hunt noticed as they walked. He had the same massive torso lines beneath his loose-fitting yellow jerkin and elaborately woven shirt of red and amber metallic threads, and the same six-fingered hands, each with two thumbs, but his skin was darker than the grays that Hunt remembered—almost black—and seemed smoother in texture; his build was lighter and more slender, his height slightly less than would have been normal, and his lower face and skull, though still elongated significantly, had receded and broadened into a more rounded head that was closer to the human profile.
"We can move objects from place to place instantaneously by means of artificially generated spinning black holes," Eesyan told them. "As your own theories predict, a rapidly spinning black hole flattens out into a disk, and eventually becomes a toroid with the mass concentrated at the rim. In that situation the singularity exists across the central aperture and can be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects. The aperture affords an `entry port' into a hyperrealm described by laws not subject to the conventional restrictions of ordinary space-time. Creating such an entry port also gives rise to a hypersymmetric effect that appears as a projection elsewhere in normal space, and which functions as a coupled exit port. By controlling the dimensions, spin, orientation, and certain other parameters of the initial hole, we can select with considerable accuracy the location of the exit up to distances in the order of several tens of light-years."
With Eesyan between Vic and Lyn, they were walking along a broad, enclosed, brightly illuminated arcade of soaring lines, gleaming sculptures, and vast openings, which led into other spaces. There were more Escher-like distortions and inversions here and there in the scene, but nothing as overwhelming as the sight they had first seen from the perceptron. Apparently Ganymean gravitic engineering tricks came with the architecture on Thurien. For this was Thurien. They had emerged from the room and walked through a series of galleries and a huge domed space bustling with Ganymeans, eventually to this place, the illusory blending so smoothly into reality that Hunt had missed the point along the way at which the switch from one to the other had taken place. The meeting between the two worlds was about to take place, Eesyan had informed them, and he had been assigned to escort them there personally. No doubt visar could have transferred them there instantly, Hunt thought, but this seemed a more natural way while they were still "acclimatizing." And having an opportunity to get to know at least one of the aliens informally in advance helped the process further. Probably that was the idea.
"That must be how you got the perceptron to Earth," Hunt said.
"Almost to Earth," Eesyan told him. "A black hole large enough to take a sizable object creates a significant gravitational disturbance over a large distance. Therefore we don't project things like that into the middle of planetary systems; it would disrupt clocks and calendars and so on. We exited the perceptron outside the Solar System, and it had to make the last lap in a more conventional way."
"So a round trip needs four conventional stages," Lyn commented. "Two one way, and two the other?"
"Correct."
"Which explains why it took something like a day to make it from Thurien to Earth," Hunt said.
"Yes. Instant planet-to-planet hopping is out. But communications is another matter entirely. We can send messages by beaming a gamma frequency microlaser into a microscopic black-hole toroid that can be generated in equipment capable of operating on planetary surfaces without undesirable side effects. So instant planet-to-planet datalinks are practicable. What's more, generating the microscopic black holes needed for them doesn't require the enormous amount of energy that holes big enough to send ships through do. So we don't do a lot of instantaneous people-moving unless we have to; we prefer moving information instead."
It fitted in with what Hunt already knew: he and Lyn were really at McClusky, and all the information they were perceiving was being transmitted there through visar. "That explains how the information gets sent," he said. "But what's the input to the system? How is it originated in the first place?"
"Thurien is a fully `wired' planet," Eesyan explained. "So are most of the other planets in the portions of the Galaxy where we have spread. visar exists all over those worlds, and in other places between, as a dense network of sensors located inside the structures of buildings and cities, distributed invisibly across mountains, forests, and plains, and in orbit above planetary surfaces. By combining and interpolating between its data inputs, it is able to compute and synthesize the complete sensory input that would be experienced by a person located at any particular place.
"visar bypasses the normal input channels to the brain and stimulates symbolic neural patterns directly with focused arrays of high-resolution spatial stress-waves. Thus it can inject straight into the mind all the information that would be received by somebody physically present at whatever place is specified. Also it monitors the neural activity of the voluntary motor system and reproduces faithfully all the feedback sensations that would accompany muscular movements and so forth. The net result is to create an illusion of actually being at a remote location which is indistinguishable from the real thing. Physically transporting the body would add nothing."
"Star travel the easy way," Lyn murmured. She gazed around as they came to the end of the arcade and turned off to begin walking across a curved, sweeping surface that had looked like a wall a minute ago, but now seemed to be pivoting slowly as they moved onto it and lifting the whole of the arcade and the structures connected to it up at an increasing angl
e behind them. "This is all real and twenty light-years away?" she said, still sounding disbelieving. "I really haven't come here?"
"Can you tell the difference?" Eesyan asked her.
"How about you, Porthik?" Hunt asked as a new thought struck him. "Are you actually here . . . there . . . whatever, in Vranix, or what?"
"I'm on an artificial world twenty million miles from Thurien," Eesyan replied. "Calazar is on Thurien, but six thousand miles from Vranix at a place called Thurios—the principal city of Thurien. Vranix is an old city that we keep preserved for sentimental and traditional reasons. Frenua Showm, whom you were also expecting to meet and will very shortly, is on a planet called Crayses, which is in a star system about nine light-years from Gistar."
Lyn was looking puzzled. "I'm not quite sure I get this," she said. "How do we all manage to get consistent impressions when we're in different places? How do I see you there, Vic next to you, and all this around us when it's scattered all over the Galaxy?" Hunt was still too boggled by what Eesyan had said a moment earlier to be able to ask anything.
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