Mission to Minerva g-5

by James P. Hogan

  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 the
re 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Hunt would never have believed he'd see the day when humans showed sentimentality over a computer. After further successful tests involving the raft, the next major step was to scale things up to operational dimensions by repeating the experiment with the Shapieron itself-the size of the Gate configuration had been decided with this as the eventual aim. The Shapieron was the only ship of its kind in existence, and if anything went wrong, it would be irreplaceable. But everything leading up to this crucial test had gone well enough to satisfy even Eesyan, and eventually the time came when the moment of decision had to be faced.

  The first trial of dematerializing the entire ship would be just that-involving the vessel only, with no Ganymean or human presence aboard. Such a precaution was the routine approach, but in this instance there was an unusual complication. An integral part of the Shapieron was its distributed control and computing entity, ZORAC-in some ways a diminutive precursor of VISAR-which had been doing invaluable work plugged into the planetary net while the Shapieron was based on Jevlen. In fact, VISAR's informal, whimsical style of interacting had been modeled to a large degree on the interface designs of the old starship systems, which had been popular among the crews. ZORAC had been the first alien intelligence that Hunt, Danchekker, and the other Terrans present at the time had actually talked to when the Shapieron first appeared at Ganymede after its strange exile. To them, and others who had gotten to know ZORAC in the subsequent period of Ganymean-Terran dealings out at Jupiter, or later during the Shapieron's six-month stay on Earth, it had a distinct personality that warranted classing it as a sentient being in its own right, in every sense of the word. And this was even more true
of Garuth and his Ganymean crew, for whom ZORAC had been not only a totally dependable manager of the ship and everything in it upon which their lives had depended for twenty years, but also a companion, advisor, and mentor in a way that made it as much a fellow member of the mission as any Ganymean. In short, by universal accord, it would be a shame to lose the ship, but if that was what it came to they could live with it; but they weren't prepared to jeopardize ZORAC.

  ZORAC itself was unperturbed about the prospect, having concluded from the record of experiments up to that point that the probability of anything going seriously amiss was not something to be wearing out any circuits over. The electronic and optronic devices that had been transferred through M-space and recovered had continued functioning normally, and likewise the animals. It was just another case of soggy biological carbon-based minds getting emotional again, and so best left to them to come up with something that would make them happier. What the biological minds came up with was that as an insurance, before the trial was conducted a full backup of ZORAC would be stored by VISAR. At least, this information would enable ZORAC to be recreated in some other form later if worse came to worst-exactly what such a form might be was something they agreed to worry about when and if it should become necessary.

  In the event, the worries turned out to have been misplaced. The first trial in which the Shapieron was dematerialized from the Gate was a very cautious affair that involved merely shifting it a few hundred miles to a beacon positioned not far away in the Gistar system of a reality that was very "close." ZORAC almost caused coronaries by faking a system crash for several seconds before announcing that it was fine and the experience had actually been less unsettling than a regular transfer through h-space. As confidence grew, the scope of the tests was gradually increased until pitching a beacon out across the Multiverse (exactly "where" to was still not something that could be predetermined with any exactness), sending the Shapieron to home on it, and then bringing the Shapieron back had been demonstrated as a task that could be repeated at will. And that brought them finally to the second hurdle that there was no way around: the first trial involving living people.