by Nathan Dodge
“Some theoretically. None related to our current situation.”
Benedict turned to the door. “Well, I warned you it was probably foolishness anyway. What the hell do I know about relational physics? I’ll get out of your hair, Bill. Please don’t let on to Stamson what Camm is really doing. He thinks I meddle enough, anyway. Besides, there’s little chance anything I say will add appreciably to the effort.”
“On the contrary. You had your inspiration before Stamson had his; you beat him to the punch. You get any more ideas, you call me up ASAP.” Kogan didn’t look amused or irritated concerning Benedict’s requested research. He mainly looked just plain worried—and Benedict didn’t blame him.
They agreed to meet for lunch. However, Kogan was not at the officer’s table for the remainder of the day. Benedict, in fact, did not see him again for nearly twenty hours, as the next disaster was to occupy Kogan for some time to come.
V. Probe
At noon on the following ship day, as Benedict sat at his desk entering his thoughts into his log for Faye, a crew of six was sent out in an exploration boat to run experiments on the surrounding environment and test communication with the main antenna array. The boat was connected to Columbia by two thousand meters of two-centimeter-diameter titanium cable. It had no Jump capability, and only attitude thrusters and a small, low-impulse ion propulsion unit. With about a thousand meters of cable played out, the ship was invisible to all ship sensors, and electronic communication was available only via coaxial line. As a radiation detection module was being deployed from the boat, according to the last wire transmission, the cable suddenly began playing out rapidly, as though rear attitude deflectors had been activated. As the cable apparently reached its full deployment, the line tightened and snapped the bollard, deflecting a panel in the airlock. Two cabins depressurized, killing three and injuring four aboard Columbia. The boat and its crew were not seen again.
After Camm reported, Benedict sat in depressed silence, staring at the wall of his cabin. Young crewmembers, all the best in their specialty, embarking on the grandest exploration mission in the history of mankind.
Now nine of them aboard Columbia were dead in two serious accidents, plus those aboard the boat, now missing and presumed lost.
Idly, he wondered about those in the exploration boat. They were alone now, marooned, incommunicado. What would happen to them? Would they die, their bodies going through the normal putrescence process, decaying into the component chemicals that made up all life? Or would some other fate await them? The exploration boat and its passengers now represented essentially their own micro-universe in and of itself, isolated totally from any other collection of matter and energy. Would time slow down such that they drifted endlessly, not aging, never feeling thirst or hunger or the pull of any bodily function again? Would the boat achieve some sort of unchanging stasis, their last known state becoming permanent, their processes slowing to an eternally long pause?
Whatever their destiny, the congressman hoped that it would be merciful.
He decided to visit the bridge.
Despite his many times on the bridge, Benedict still found it fascinating. Lattimer, the tall, slender aide to Kogan, met him at the entrance and escorted him to Kogan’s side. The captain was, as usual, seated by the helmsman, Quince, a ten-year-older version of Lattimer, forever peering intensely at the main display screens which depicted forward and aft views, tactical information, and ship status.
At the front of the bridge, a colossal window looked out over a vista no other inhabitants of earth had ever seen. The scene: a flat, velvet black, undisturbed by oval or spiral galaxies, massive nebulae serving as the nursery for thousands of new, emerging stars, or charcoal clouds of gas and dust. Not a single star showed, in fact. Nothing but plain, severe darkness in every direction and from every possible angle.
Kogan turned as he approached. “Any sign?” Benedict asked the obvious question. He was shocked at the captain’s face, which was haggard, eyes as bloody red as though he had been crying. Quince looked equally worn. On reflection, Benedict decided that neither had probably slept in thirty-six hours.
Kogan did his familiar hand-through-hair routine. “No. We’ve followed the course they took, but nothing.”
Benedict looked around as Kogan returned to the display screens. The bridge was a large, oval room near the top center of the ship. It was scantly populated with fifteen or so specialists scattered at various consoles around its sixty-meter periphery, five or so more at the central console around Quince and Kogan. At each end of the long oval diameter were massive displays, each eight meters wide by three high. These were mainly reference displays, used when members of the bridge team needed to share information, normally displaying fore and aft views or tactical information. The consoles covered everything from life-support to engine status and communication functions.
It had at first struck Benedict as shocking that it took five hundred people to run Columbia. The even greater shock occurred when he discovered that only about twenty people total were the required operational crew, and they mainly watched monitors and gave verbal instructions to Camm. Most consoles, in fact, had few controls other than a keyboard and a few touch-panels; manual override controls must exist somewhere, but they weren’t on the bridge. The discovery that only twenty people controlled the ship—and by proxy; Camm did the real work—had led Benedict to investigate the function of the other four hundred eighty-plus personnel on board. He had found a diverse collection of crewmembers. Stamson’s science staff numbered nearly two hundred, and there were massive support staffs for the propulsions and communications activities. Ship engineering and maintenance accounted for another big slice. By the time such mundane duties as food preparation, clerical staff, counseling and medical services were considered, Benedict began to wonder how Kogan got by with only five hundred people.
And now, he reminded himself grimly, there are nearly twenty less.
Kogan’s voice brought Benedict back to the present. “We’re wasting time and fuel, Quince. Just hold our position.”
“Aye, sir. I’m not sure exactly how we do that, but I won’t use thruster power, anyway.”
Kogan gave him a weary half-smile. “Fair enough.” He stood up, as did Benedict. “Jordan, unless we blunder onto the boat, finding it will be hard, if not impossible. We can’t see. Anything farther than a few hundred meters away and sensor contact gets spotty.”
Kogan glanced toward his exec. “Mac, I’m taking five.” After the answering nod, he left the bridge with Benedict. Most bridge personnel did not bother to look up as they left, although the bridge officer, whom Benedict did not know, announced “Captain off the bridge,” as the bulkhead hatch began to slide shut after them.
Benedict had hoped to be able to say something encouraging, but nothing presented itself. He parted with the captain and returned to his cabin, where he slept fitfully.
VI. Inspiration
Heisenberg was probably here!
The message had finally made its way through the various subconscious mazes and passageways to the surface, the import clear in his otherwise fuzzy and sleepy brain. Benedict sat bolt upright, banging his head painfully against the upper bunk. Muttering curses as he recalled Stamson’s dire findings about perception, he stumbled to the head, washed his face, and made his way back to his desk, addressing the monitor as he sat. “Camm, I need you. Are you there?”
“Yes, Mr. Benedict.”
“Call me Jordan. We’re friends now, remember?”
“Yes, ah, Jordan.”
“Any progress?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Always nice to be first with brilliant inspiration.”
Camm waited silently. A glance at the ship’s clock showed the earliness of the hour: 0513. “At least you could congratulate me,” Benedict added irritably.
“Congratulations. You do seem pleased.”
“I am. It was that damn sign in Kogan’s office that has b
een running around below the surface for the last couple of days. ‘Heisenberg was probably here.’ Probably! That was the key.”
“The key to what?”
“An idea. Hell, it’s so good that even if it’s wrong, I’m proud of it. Remember the briefing you gave me on the radiation spectrum the first time I came to the captain’s cabin? We assumed that was light from the physical universe. But why the modulation? That bothered me even while I was in that first meeting with you. I kept feeling that you’d said something significant about the light. Remember? You described it as a ‘randomness.’”
“Yes.”
“That’s where Heisenberg came in. Quantum theory; probabilistic event prediction. We discovered long ago that certain ‘impossible’ events at the atomic level happened anyway. Forbidden energy levels, forbidden state transitions, impossible speeds, etc. Later, we modified our thinking: these events really weren’t ‘impossible’—they were just highly unlikely. Quantum theory allowed us to predict just how often these improbable events should happen. Your reference to ‘randomness’ of the radiation gave me the key.”
For all his protested difficulty in understanding humans, Camm had no problem with inductive leaps. “You applied analogous thinking to our exit from the universe.”
Benedict sat back in the chair and grinned. “Right.”
Musing aloud, Camm took up his string of thought. “The radiation was the key, of course. Randomness. The radiation must be making a ‘forbidden transition,’ so to speak, exiting the universe as we had. But the probability must be very low; the radiation was comparatively faint, and for the less-plentiful spectral lines, nearly nonexistent.”
“Right again. If I’m on the right track, then we must have made a transition through the edge of our universe that is highly unlikely, that should happen rarely, if at all. Now, what if the universe is closed to us in a four-D sense, but open in a relational sense, at least in terms of the higher dimensions? You mentioned that it was still a matter for conjecture. Further, assume that we came very, very close to that four-D boundary two Jumps back.”
“The memory failure.”
“I don’t think you had a memory failure at all; you just used a coordinate set which put us ‘outside.’ Now, relationally speaking, that’s probably a kosher event, but to us simple, four-dimensional folks, and our ship, that no doubt qualifies as a highly unlikely event. ‘Impossible,’ if you will.
“I’ll bet there is some sort of inverse relationship between ‘likelihood’ and power used to travel in this bus. We inadvertently made a ‘forbidden’ transition, which caused a lot of extra energy to be consumed. We paid a hefty power penalty to assure an unlikely event would happen. Like Russian roulette, but one bullet in a hundred trillion—and we got it through a tiny crack in an impenetrable wall. Just barely, anyhow.
“Actually, I’ll bet we are well within the multi-vector universe. The problem is, we’re outside the confines that we regard as ‘the universe.’ How do we reconcile this to the theory?”
Camm was silent for so long that Benedict assumed he had been called away on some urgent matter that required all his resources. Finally the speaker awoke. “There is a line of thought that postulates a semi-infinite MV universe, with finite though very large embedded 4-D universes like ours, spread like diamonds scattered in a diamond mine over the many-dimensional MV extent. That had always seemed a little unlikely to me, but now maybe it makes sense.”
After a moment, Camm added, “I’ve also been pondering the exploration boat disaster. As it was moving away from the ship, I very quickly lost contact with it. It wasn’t as though it was far away; it simply ceased to be detectable. Radiation does not easily penetrate whatever existence we happened into.”
“Like a ship in the fog. And the ‘fog’ is the unlikelihood of transitions occurring. Let me make a suggestion. First, I think that your multi-vector coordinates are absolutely correct; we’re right where they say we are. Unfortunately, some of those higher-order dimensional values you mentioned, the ones you normally ignore, may now be pertinent, and it’s probably hard to say which. How many are there?”
“Of the higher order matrix values? An infinite number. Of the possibly critical values, hard to say, but at least thousands, maybe millions. Those are the so-called imaginary values above the time dimension which, as you recalled, we normally ignore.”
“Okay. Two Jumps ago we were in our familiar universe. We made one Jump more, used a lot of extra energy, and here we are. Or there we were. Another Jump, even more energy, and bingo! We’re in the dark, in a number of ways. How much energy used on the second Jump?”
“Thirty percent of reserves.”
“Whew! So we’re down to sixty percent or so.”
“Fifty-three. The ship uses a considerable amount in life support and other normal operations.”
“And no way to replenish it. I think I see the answer. Simply Jump back two coordinate sets ago, and you’re home.”
“But, Mr. Benedict, we tried that and it didn’t work.” Camm sounded almost disappointed. Benedict grinned.
“But you didn’t use full power, Camm. Stamson had you tie in that energy monitor to limit power input. Right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the answer. Regardless of our distance to that mythical boundary, Jumping around out here costs a lot of energy. We have to pay a massive power penalty to guarantee this highly improbable event in either direction. Let’s see; you said five percent of reserve for the first Jump, thirty percent for the second; that’s thirty-five percent. That says we can make the return Jump ‘inside’ with eighteen percent left.”
“What if,” Camm asked quietly, “the two Jumps have made the return more unlikely. That is, what if the power requirements are not additive? If there happens to be some sort of geometrical relationship involved, it could take more power than we have to get back.”
“Hmm. In other words, we fell downhill to get where we are now, but have to crawl back uphill to get back. I see your point.” Benedict got up, walked in two tight circles around his cabin, and sat back down. “Then we’re in real trouble, I guess. But it could just as easily be the other way, too. Tell me something: After Stamson had you hook in the power limiters, how many Jumps did you try?”
“Seven. With no apparent result.”
“What was the power limit?”
“Point one percent.”
“Well, then, it’s pretty clear that the present approach won’t work. You might as well at least study mine and see if it has possibilities. How long would it take you to look it over?”
“Hours. It would take much longer to consider all the aspects of your suggestion, but I can probably put some confidence bounds on it by later today.”
Benedict assented and signed off. The next six hours were a slow-motion agony of pointless activities designed to kill time. He wandered about the ship, ate two lunches, and tried vainly to concentrate on his journal. Once he opened his reader to old issues of The American Rose, forcing mental pictures of time-honored, ancient names such as Old Blush and First Prize, and modern ones like Century Twenty-Two and Pakistani Sunset. Each time his attention wandered, and he found himself tensely awaiting a call. Finally, at 1445 on the display, he could wait no longer and called Camm. The response was immediate.
“I was about to notify you. The admiral has been executing a number of experiments and I’ve had less time for your work than usual. As nearly as I can determine, we have, in fact, always had the capacity to execute such a transition as long as the relational engine has existed.”
Benedict started to nod, and then found himself making an intuitive leap. “Camm, could that be a possible reason why one of the early missions was lost—mission three, which simply disappeared in our own solar system?”
“Exactly—and well done, sir. The higher-order terms only predominate in situations where the four-dimensional curvature becomes significant; that is, a journey substantially longer than about thi
rty percent of the radius of curvature of our 4-D universe.
“In any case, your suggestion appears valid, and I can assess a fifty percent chance of success.”
“Not too good,” Benedict muttered.
“On the contrary, very good. Outstanding, compared to the approaches currently being taken. But we must hurry if we are to implement your plan. Admiral Stamson and the staff have experimented with a large number of incremental Jumps, forty-three so far today. Our power availability is down to slightly more than forty-eight percent.”
“Dear God. The staff is going to piss away our power a dribble at a time if we don’t do something.” Benedict considered. “Let’s face it: the problem is to get Stamson to consider this line of reasoning, and we both know he won’t if my name is on it.”
“That is true.”
“Look, before I make a suggestion, do you agree with my idea?”
Camm didn’t hesitate. “It’s the best available, in my opinion.”
Benedict managed a thin smile. “Faint praise.”
“Sorry, Jordan. Just stating the truth—your approach is the best we have; none of our alternatives are perfect. The crew’s collective ability to perceive reality will almost certainly continue to degrade. My control mechanisms will be our only safety net, and there may be long-term effects on my operation which I cannot predict.”
Benedict did two more laps around the tiny cabin. How could he get around that pompous windbag of a scientist? “We might be able to get Kogan to order the Jump based on my suggestion and your limited research. But let’s face it, we both know Stamson would cause a magnitude-eight earthquake about it.”
“You can commandeer the mission and order Kogan to comply. It is within your charter.”
“Maybe. But he’ll be able to stall me. It might even take us past the time when we have the minimum energy to make it, especially with all the experiments Stamson is running now.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t pull rank. You have it. Stamson is going to destroy any chance of our crew getting out of this. I’m not human, Benedict, but I don’t want to watch you all die. I don’t want to be my own tiny universe for perhaps the rest of eternity.”