Mission to Minerva g-5 Read online

  ***

  In a neighborhood bar called Happy Days, a few miles from Goddard, Dr. Victor Hunt leaned back in a corner booth by the window and took in the scene. It was a sunny Saturday morning in June. People were making the best of the fine weekend. Across the aisle, three men who had pulled up earlier in a pickup loaded with timber were downing some preventative thirst medicine on what looked like their way to a home remodeling project. Some younger people at the far end were working up enthusiasm in advance for the Baltimore Orioles versus Atlanta Braves game due to be played later. A couple sat holding hands across one of the tables, blissfully unaware of anything else.

  For Hunt, the snatched moment of relaxation was a rare luxury. His position as Deputy Director for Physics of UNSA Advanced Sciences put him at the center of the effort to assimilate Thurien scientific knowledge without disrupting Earth's social and economic structure. Already, some of the most cherished notions once believed to be permanently beyond questioning had been consigned to oblivion. The whole system of values that most had considered as constituting the inescapable underpinnings of commerce and production was having to be rethought in the light of the Thurien existence, proof that deeper, less adversarial ways of motivating creativity and cooperation were possible. Nobody knew what the next ten or twenty years might bring. Paradoxically, for the majority of people this all added up to carrying on more or less as normal. The gigantic forces now in motion that would change all their lives irreversibly were beyond any ability of theirs to control.

  A swarthy figure sporting a shaggy mustache and wearing a bright scarlet shirt and shorts turned from the bar and came over, bearing two pint glasses of black, creamy-headed Guinness. Jerry Santello was Hunt's neighbor from the adjacent apartment unit in a landscaped residential development on the edge of town. They had come out for some refreshment after a morning workout at the complex's gym. Jerry deposited the glasses on the table, pushed one across, and sat back down on the seat opposite.

  "Cheers," Hunt acknowledged, raising his in salutation as he picked it up.

  Jerry took a draft and licked his lips. "I'd never have believed it. I'm actually taking to this stuff."

  "About time, too. Beats that fizzy yellow concoction. Too sweet. I'm not sure I like the connotations of Clydesdales, either."

  "The bartender asked me if I wanted them mixed with ale. Is that normal in England too?"

  "Black and tan," Hunt replied, nodding.

  "Oh, really?"

  "Half and half. That's what they call it. It was the name of the auxiliary military units the English used in Ireland back it the time of the Troubles… around 1920, or whenever it was. They had uniforms that were half police and half army."

  "Wasn't it two different countries there until not long ago?"

  "Right. The North originally stayed with the UK-when the rest became the Republic."

  "What was all that shit about? I never could figure it."

  Hunt shrugged. "Usual thing, Jerry. Too many Catholics. Too many Protestants. No Christians." He looked away while he took another sip. A girl called Julie, who worked in one of the administration sections at ASD, had come in with two others that he didn't recognize. Jerry carried on.

  "Anyway, Vic, as I was saying, this scheme that the guys are buying into… People are working less, retiring sooner, and when the family's grown and gone and they move to a smaller house that's paid for." He made an open-handed gesture. "They've got money. The spendable income isn't with the kids anymore. By the time they leave school half of them are maxed out on credit already."

  Jerry was a former employee of the intelligence agencies. The spy business had contracted markedly as the world gradually resolved a legacy of twentieth-century political absurdities by allowing people to live among those they chose to. Having banked a lump severance payment, and finding himself less than enamored by the thought of returning to the corporate style of workplace, he was constantly on the lookout for investment opportunities to provide the wherewithal for preserving the ease and freedoms that a period of enforced paid leave had led him to grow accustomed to. The latest was a plan for a chain of theater-restaurants with lounge bars and dance floors to cater to the more mature clientele. It was an interesting thought, Hunt had to agree. There were probably thousands of such couples, or singles wanting to be half a couple, hidden away in the suburbs with nowhere to go that suited their taste. At just over forty himself, Hunt could go for it.

  "I've always wanted to own a nightclub," he said. "I like the image. It must be from seeing Casablanca years ago. You know, Bogart in the white tuxedo with the carnation in the lapel. Piano bar and all that stuff… You don't see that kind of style these days. Do you reckon we could bring it back, Jerry?"

  Jerry tossed up a hand. "Who knows? Anything's possible. Does that mean you're in?"

  "How much are we talking about?"

  "The other guys are coming in for ten grand."

  "Um… I'd need to think a bit more. How soon do you need to know?"

  "The option on the deal closes at the end of next week."

  "Okay, I'll let you know one way or another by then."

  "You can't lose, Vic. Lot's of people have been waiting for something like this, who don't take to the bar scene. Some place to go out and meet your friends, have a meal, see a show… Music that you don't have to be some kind of spastic epileptic or something to dance to…"

  "Dr. Hunt?" Hunt looked up. Julie had come over to the booth with her two friends. She was tallish and slim, with fair hair, a scattering of freckles around her nose, and just at that moment, a nervously uncertain smile. "I saw you over here and just wanted to stop by and say hi. I hope you don't mind."

  "Not at all. Glad you did." Hunt looked at her quizzically for a moment. "Julie, from the main admin section, right?"

  "That's right!" Julie seemed impressed.

  Hunt glanced at the other two girls, who were hovering behind. "So what are we doing-starting a party?"

  "Oh. This is Becky, who's visiting from Virginia… and Dana."

  Hunt gestured across the booth. "Jerry, my neighbor."

  "You live near here?"

  "Redfern Canyons-on the west side from here."

  "I think I know it. Where they have all the valleys and ridges cut into the hills so it looks like somewhere in California. With a creek and ponds down the middle."

  "That's it."

  Becky, who was looking mildly awed, found her voice finally. "This is really the Dr. Hunt… who was there at Ganymede when the aliens came back, and then discovered that whole world inside the computer on Jevlen?" She shook her head. "I always think of people you see on shows and read about in magazines as flying everywhere in limousines and living in places with security gates and fences. But here you are, just a regular guy in the local bar."

  "I hope we weren't interrupting something," Dana said.

  "We're quaffing away all the benefit from a couple of hours of healthy working out this morning," Hunt replied. "But I've always had this theory that too much health is bad for you."

  "So that tastes really good, I bet." Julie indicated their drinks.

  "The first one didn't touch the sides going down," Jerry said.

  "Actually, Jerry was trying to sell me on a business proposition. Restaurant nightclubs for older fossils like us to get out to and creak around in. What do you think?"

  Julie looked perplexed. "I'm not sure what to say. You don't exactly look over the hill or anything like that, Dr. Hunt."

  "Oh, don't worry about it," Hunt told her cheerfully. "People have the wrong attitude. What's wrong with getting over a hill? Think what happens on a bicycle. All the hard work's over. You just leave everything to gravity, sit back, enjoy the view, and pick up speed. Life's the same. That's why everyone says time goes so much faster. You know-" The call tone from the seefone in the holder on his belt interrupted. "Excuse me." He took it out, flipped it open, and thumbed the Accept button. The head and shoulders of a young man in a w
hite shirt greeted him on the screen. A caption below gave the sending code and advised that the call was from the UNSA Goddard Center. "Hello. Vic Hunt here."

  "Dr. Hunt, this is ASD. We have an incoming off-planet call on hold. The caller is asking for you."

  Off-planet? Hunt wasn't especially expecting anything of that nature. UNSA communications from distances farther than about the Moon usually came in as recordings because of the propagation delays. Ironically, an interactive call was more likely to be from the Thuriens' interstellar net, which communicated virtually instantaneously via spinning microscopic black-hole toroids, and linked to the Terran system via Earth-orbiting relay satellites. "Who is it?" he asked, at the same time conveying an apology with his eyes to the others around him. But the face on the screen hesitated, seeming not to know how to answer. "It doesn't matter," Hunt said. "Just put it through." A moment later, he was staring incredulously in total befuddlement.

  The face looking back at him was of a man around forty, with tanned, lean-lined features giving him an alert and active look, and wavy brown hair starting to show touches of gray just discernible on the matchbook-size screen. He seemed amused, even impudently so, waiting several seconds as if savoring the effect to the utmost. Finally, he said, "I suppose this must come as a bit of a shock."

  Which perhaps qualified as one of the greatest understatements in all Hunt's years of experience. For the face was his own. He was talking to some bizarre version-existing in some other where, and for all he knew, some other "when"-of himself. He could do nothing but sit there, stupefied, unable to muster a coherent response. The three girls exchanged mystified looks. Then Jerry said, "Are you all right, Vic?"

  The words jolted Hunt sufficiently to make him look up, though for the moment still only marginally aware of his surroundings. Finally, with an effort, he forced his faculties back to something resembling working order. "Er, I'm sorry," he said, standing up. "If you'll excuse me, I need to take this privately." He crossed to the exit and left.

  "What was it, a ghost?" Jerry muttered to the others.

  Outside in the parking lot, Hunt climbed into his car and closed the door. The face of his other self was still there, waiting on the screen of the seefone. "Okay, I give up," he told it. "So… just what in hell is going on?"

  "I'll try to be brief, because there may not be a lot of time," the image answered. "First, the Thuriens are trying the wrong approach. It isn't an extension of the h-space physics the way they've assumed. That only applies within particular wave solutions evolving vertically and manifesting internal space and time separation. Horizontal movement involves a different concept. Think of the dynamics of the data structures that we found in JEVEX's computing matrix… As I said, there may not be a lot of time. This is an early test run. We haven't learned how to sustain coherence for extended periods yet. I've got a compressed file here that will give you what we've managed to figure out so far. The main thing you need to know about is the convergences. But codes can be different, even between nearby regions. Can you send me something to scan for any transmission corrections we might need to make?"

  "What…?" Hunt was still numbed by the shock.

  "A file out of your system there. Anything. We need to know the codes you're using so the one here can be set to match."

  "Oh… Right…" Hunt shook himself into action sufficiently to bring up a directory of his personal library and flagged one of the items for transmission.

  "Using the phone," his alter ego observed. "Where have I caught you?"

  "Er… I'm in the parking lot outside Happy's. I was with Jerry Santello… Here, it's coming through now."

  "Okay, got it. Let's see, now…" The alter-Hunt looked away. "Which time was that?" he inquired as he worked, evidently consulting some off-screen oracle.

  "A Saturday-the time that Julie from admin showed up with a couple of her friends. There's an Orioles-Braves game due to be played later."

  "I don't recall that. It was probably different on this time line. The parallelisms can show surprising discontinuities." Then, in a louder voice, apparently to someone nearby, "Have we got it yet?"

  "Jerry was selling the restaurant-dance-bar thing again," Hunt said.

  "Oh, that. Yes. Tell him to forget it. It's a scam. The pictures in the brochure he's got are faked. It's a shell company set up by a Ukrainian outfit who'll take the money and fold. If you want a better deal, buy Formaflex in Austin. Small pilot experiment. Nobody knows about it yet-limited license to deal in Thurien matter-duplicator technology. It's going to go over big." Alter-Hunt winked, then looked away again. "Okay? Are we ready? Can I send-"

  The connection died, as twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth's surface the object that had appeared out of nowhere dissolved into a haze that dispersed and faded, leaving nothing.

  Hunt waited fifteen minutes, but nothing more came through.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Even before the first contact with Ganymeans, when the Shapieron from ancient Minerva returned from its strange exile out of normal spacetime, the majority of Earth's physicists had come to favor the explanation of quantum weirdness known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI. Its claims were so bizarre and counterintuitive that many maintained it couldn't have been conceived by unaided human imagination or unwitting self-deception. Therefore, it had to be true. The discovery that a race of advanced, starfaring aliens had reached the same conclusion seemed as strong an endorsement as anyone could wish for and pretty much won over the last of the doubters.

  The "quantum paradoxes" that textbooks and popular writers of years gone by had reveled in arose when a system of quantum entities such as photons or electrons existing in some particular state changed to some different state when a number of new states were possible. Examples might be an energetically excited atom that could relax back to its minimum-energy "ground" state via any of several alternative sequences of intermediate energy levels, or a photon hitting a half-silvered mirror, which gave it a fifty-fifty chance of being reflected or transmitted. How did Nature "choose" from the various possibilities the one that actually took place?

  On the face of it, the situation seemed no different from that of, say, a gambler's die, which from the rolling state could assume any of six discrete final states, each showing a different number. The mechanics of moving objects was well understood, and only inability to specify precisely the die's shape, mass, and motion prevented the outcome to be predicted reliably every time. In other words there was no mystery. The outcome was determined, but imperfect knowledge made it unpredictable. However, this was only another way of saying that the situations were not the same to begin with. At the quantum level, this was not so. The systems being investigated were identical in every way that could be established. Why, then, should they behave differently?

  Quantum objects acted as if they were everything at once while they were not interacting with their environment, but the instant they encountered another entity capable of pinning them down-for instance, a detector in a measuring instrument designed to find out something about them-they abruptly took on one from the available selection of possible states. Hardly surprisingly, such oddness did not sit lightly with beings accustomed to a world in which things knew what they were and continued to be so while nothing was looking at them. The scientific debate about the perplexing accumulation of quantum paradoxes raged through the first two decades of the twentieth century-beginning, ironically, immediately following a series of confident assurances that everything of substance was known and science was effectively a closed book. But there could be no getting away from what the results of countless experiments seemed to indicate. The challenge was to account for them in a way that described what was "really" going on.

  Some refused to get embroiled in the issue at all, and instead took the view of science as being simply a pragmatic process for generating numbers to be compared with experimental results, beyond which nothing more could be said. For a long time the predominant view wa
s that nothing really existed in any objective sense at all until an act of observation caused it to assume one of its possible sets of attributes ("states") randomly. Exactly what constituted an "observation" was a further source of contention, opinions covering the range of steps from any interaction with another quantum object, to the final registering of an impression upon a human consciousness. Others avoided the disturbingly mystical implications of this kind of approach by maintaining that the allegedly identical objects weren't really identical but differed in some subtle ways that eluded detection at the present time. The problem with this, however was that it required everything in the universe to be capable, just as subtly, of instantly influencing everything else, a notion which many considered to be every bit as mystical as anything else that was being said, if not more so.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the scientific world had come to terms with accepting that whatever answer they settled on was going to be bizarre by normal standards anyway, so they might as well get used to throwing away all preconceptions and focus purely on what the facts seemed to be trying to say. And what the facts said, when the formalism was taken at face value without imposing some arbitrary wave-function "collapse" that the mathematics said nothing about, was that the world showed evidence of being everything at once because it was everything at once; the reason it didn't appear that way was that everyday awareness only apprehends a small part of it.

  According to the picture that finally emerged, neither an energized atom nor an impinging photon "chooses" one state from an ensemble of possible states-thus provoking endless debates about how, when, and why it gets to make that choice; every possibility is actualized-but each in its own separate reality, which then continues to evolve the various consequences of the particular alternative that led to it. The various realities all contain versions of their inhabitants that are consistent with the unfolding of events making up that reality, remaining unaware of all the rest. The dice thrower in one reality rolls a boxcar, double six, breaks the bank, and retires rich; his counterpart in another of the thirty-six possible two-die variants rolls zilch, loses his shirt, and jumps off a bridge. This formed the essence of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.