Mission to Minerva g-5 Read online

  The main socializing focus seemed to be a sunken area of booths and seating alcoves set around a more open floor to one side of the lobby, screened behind planters and partitions and doubling as a bar and coffee shop. The sign in Jevlenese by the entrance gave it as the Broghuilio Lounge in recognition of their esteemed leader, but later Terrans, probably on account of its situation a few steps down from the lobby, had dubbed it the Pit Stop, which the Thuriens obligingly added in English. No arrangement had been made for the Terrans to see the Thurien Mutliverse work until the next morning. The rest of the day was for relaxing and acclimatizing. So after unpacking, freshening up, and settling in, it was to the Pit Stop that Hunt and the rest of the team gravitated, as well as others who had been on the Ishtar. The Thuriens who had been detailed to take care of them were either there already or drifted in later as time went by. It was a strange contrast that Hunt had observed before. Nothing ever seemed hurried or strained in Thurien day-to-day personal life. Yet when they put their minds to something like a construction or scientific project, the speed and efficiency with which they went about things could be astounding.

  ***

  Preoccupation with rebuilding their culture back on their home world had reduced the numbers of Jevlenese coming to Thurien compared to those seen in times gone by. On the other hand, Terrans in some capacity or other were becoming a regular ingredient of life, so the demand for accommodation at the Waldorf was as brisk as ever. The Ishtar's complement had included a school group from Oregon on their way to summer camp on a world that had real dinosaurs; an Estonian choir that had been commissioned to give a series of performances across Thurien; and some technical support people from Formaflex Inc. of Austin, Texas, who were conducting an experiment on the economic effects of introducing Thurien matter-duplicating technology to Earth-the same outfit that Hunt's alter ego had tipped as an investment, which Hunt had passed on to his neighbor, Jerry. There were also some Jevlenese, but they tended to keep themselves apart, conditioned by tradition and upbringing to see Terrans as their implacable Cerian rivals.

  Hunt found himself sitting with Sonnebrandt, Chien, and a Thurien called Othan, who was attached to the project at Quelsang in some kind of technical capacity. Sandy and Duncan had gone sightseeing around the city, Danchekker was away, checking something to do with the arrangements for tomorrow, and Mildred was making sure that the Waldorf staff were briefed on Lynx's foibles, aversions, and preferences.

  As was the case with many Thurien materials, the table they were sitting at could be made opaque, transparent, and take on various textures. Currently it was glass-topped and functioning as a holo-tank, which Othan had been using to give them a visual tour of Thurios. The image contained in it now, however, was of the Quelsang Institute, where they would be going tomorrow. It was like a miniature version of Thurios, interconnected high-rise structures standing amid parkland and trees, but more curvy and exotically styled. Othan said it was named after a long-deceased Thurien notable. "Institute" was the term that Terran linguists had applied when nothing better really matched the original Thurien word.

  "So what kind of a place is it?" Sonnebrandt asked.

  "I'm not sure I know enough about Terran organizations to be able to compare it with anything," Othan replied.

  "I met an Australian who was there, studying Thurien propulsion," Chien said. "He described it as a mix between advanced-physics research and teaching laboratories, and a philosophical academy."

  "Who runs it?" Sonnebrandt asked. Othan looked perplexed.

  "The administration sounds a lot less centralized than what we're used to," Chien said. "There doesn't seem to be much in the way of any coordinating policy."

  "Different groups use the facilities to pursue their own programs, depending on what interests them," Othan said.

  "So how are they coordinated? What unifies them in their approach?" Sonnebrandt persisted… Suppose they have different theoretical foundations. Or even contradictory ones. Would Quelsang be supporting all of it?"

  Othan didn't seem to understand the problem. "Well, yes," he agreed. "How else would we find out which was true?"

  "The Australian told me it was like a scientific artists' colony," Chien said.

  Hunt couldn't make out whether she approved or not. The kind of tradition she was from would not have accustomed her to see the beneficial side, but from his previous dealings with Thuriens he knew something about how they worked. There was no Thurien Establishment to pronounce the approved consensus on a given subject, or any institutionalized reward system that would encourage conformity to it. Ideas either worked or they didn't; predictions succeeded or failed; evidence said what it said, regardless of anyone's preferences or preconceptions. Without political pressures or fears of losing face-which didn't especially affect Thuriens in any case-individuals left alone to make their own assessments in their own time would eventually come around to playing a part in an act that was going somewhere, rather than be left out in the cold with one that wasn't.

  Sonnebrandt seemed to get the picture. "I can't see something like that being made to work back home anytime soon," he remarked, looking at Hunt.

  Hunt shook his head. "About as likely as the tribal witch doctor hanging up his mask and starting over as a bottle washer in the village clinic," he replied. "The Thuriens don't have police forces. What does that tell you about something just a little bit fundamentally different in our natures?"

  "Ah, excuse me. It is Dr. Victor Hunt, the English?"

  Hunt turned to find a pretty girl of about fourteen or fifteen standing by his chair, dressed in a sailor-suit school uniform. She looked Japanese and was holding a red, cloth-bound book and a pen. Hunt grinned. "None other. Who are you?"

  "My name is Ko."

  "Hi, Ko. What can I do for you?"

  "Sorry for intrusion. But I collect many famous autographs. I would be honored if I could add also the great scientist."

  "A pleasure. The honor is mine." He took the book, and while the others looked on, smiling, wrote,

  To Ko, who came a long way from home. I hope you didn't follow me here just for this.

  Victor Hunt Thurios, Planet Thurien In the system of the Giants' Star October, 2033

  Ko looked uncertainly at Othan. "Could have Thurien, too?" she inquired a shade timidly.

  VISAR came in on the circuit-it had to be involved for her to talk to the Thurien. "You can speak Japanese, Ko. I'll take care of it."

  It took Ko a moment to realize what was happening. Then she handed Othan the book. "I already have Bressin Nylek's," she said as Othan penned something in heavy Thurien Gothic-like script. "He's an officer on the Ishtar. That was the ship we came here in. I have the captain's, too."

  "Very enterprising," Sonnebrandt commented.

  Not wanting to leave anyone out, Ko passed her book to him and Chien in an unspoken invitation when Othan had finished. "I was hoping to find Professor Danchekker," Ko said, looking around while they complied. "The scientist who went to Ganymede, too."

  "He's away right now, but-" Hunt started to say, and then caught sight of Danchekker coming down the steps from the lobby area and looking around. "No, wait. You're in luck. Here he is now." Hunt caught Danchekker's attention with a wave, and Danchekker came over. "Your fame knows no bounds, Chris. This is Ko, who collects autographs. She wants your moniker."

  "What?… Oh. Yes, of course… My word, you have been busy, young lady." Danchekker sustained a smile while he added his inscription. Ko trotted away happily.

  "How goes life in the rest of the universe?" Hunt asked as Danchekker pulled up a chair to join them.

  "Cousin Mildred has been drilling the unfortunates who work here on the art of living with her blasted cat. Luckily, they are mostly Jevlenese. Many Thuriens are uncomfortable around carnivores. For a while there was pandemonium. She thought they'd lost it."

  "The missing Lynx?" Hunt threw in.

  Danchekker groaned under his breath and tried to ignore it. "E
verything is arranged for Quelsang tomorrow."

  "Did you find out if Porthik will be here?" Hunt asked. Porthik Eesyan was the scientific adviser from Thurios that they knew from the Jevlen expedition. He had been playing a leading part in the Multiverse work.

  "Yes, he will. He has some news that he wants to give you personally, Vic. The ideas you forwarded were right on. The Thuriens have been looking into them intently. It seems they were a lot closer to success than they thought. In fact, it appears that they have actually been sending things into other universes and not realizing it!"

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  UNSA had, of course, communicated to the Thuriens the message from Hunt's universe-traveling other self, and the Thuriens had immediately begun exploring theoretical models and preliminary experimental setups to see what could be made of a matrix propagation approach to the problem. It turned out that a reinterpretation of some of the work they had been doing ever since the Minerva event showed they had been closer to making a breakthrough than they imagined.

  Their experiments before Hunt's input had led them to propose a hypothetical particle that Duncan Watt referred to whimsically in a UNSA report as a "thurion," and the name had stuck. The thurion was invoked to account for an energy deficit observed in certain quark interactions, but direct evidence of its existence had never been observed, even in situations where predictions of finding it came close to certainty. So either thurions didn't exist, in which case the theory that said they should was flawed, or something was wrong with the methods being used to look for them. But after careful reanalysis and double checking, both the theoreticians and the experimenters insisted that their side of the house was clean. Thurions had to exist; yet the facts said they didn't.

  At that point VISAR pointed out that this resolved logically if "the facts" were taken as referring to this universe, while the thurions existed in a different one. In other words, the Thuriens had stumbled on what they were trying to achieve without realizing it. The reason why they hadn't realized it was that nothing indicating such a process came out of the conventional h-space physics that they had been trying to apply. But when they reran the data using an approach based on longitudinal matrix waves of the kind Hunt had proposed, the effect followed immediately. In fact, fluctuations at the quantum level would be expected to produce something like it all the time naturally-spontaneous transfers of energy across the Multiverse "grain" that would reveal themselves as sudden appearances and disappearances of virtual particles at the smallest time scales. It perhaps accounted for the quantum-level "foam" permeating the vacuum, which physicists had known about and measured for a long time, but never been able to really explain.

  Hence, the arrivals from Earth found the Thuriens in a state of considerable excitement. This was not only on account of the thurion mystery being solved, but additionally because things had already progressed significantly further. The key to the whole business, it turned out, was Thurien gravitic technology. The reason why Maxwell's equations didn't yield a longitudinal wave component was that they related only to the aspect of the underlying matrix that was described electromagnetically. Charged objects in motion experienced an electrical drag that increased with velocity. This meant that the faster they moved, the more they resisted further acceleration, which was another way of saying they exhibited an increase in mass. Energy supplied in excess of what they could absorb by changing their motion was disposed of as radiation. Eventually, all of the energy being applied would be radiated, beyond which point no further acceleration was possible and the effective mass would be infinite. This, of course, described all the experimental work carried out on Earth through the previous century and interpreted in terms of relativity theory, which had pronounced the limit on velocity to be universal. But in fact it only applied to electrical phenomena-which was neither here nor there as far as Terran scientists were concerned, since they had no means of accelerating electrically neutral matter to high speeds anyway. But the Thuriens did.

  Applying their gravitic methods to the matrix dynamics proposed by Hunt produced a more general form of field equations that contained a longitudinal component with solutions perpendicular to all of the four dimensions contained in the electromagnetic tensor, which could only mean trans-Multiverse propagation. Now that they were on the right track, the Thuriens at Quelsang were already transporting away to elsewhere in the Mulitiverse-the term they used was "multiporting"-electrons and protons, the building blocks of tangible matter. The next step would be to try simple molecules.

  A peculiar implication of the whole state of affairs was that if they were sending particle-energy quanta into nearby other universes, then at least some versions of their other selves who lived in those universes would be doing the same thing too. This suggested that, in principle anyway, it might be possible to detect electrons, protons, molecules, or whatever materializing here as a result of corresponding experiments going on next door. The Thuriens had been looking for such events, but the results so far had been negative. From VISAR's latest computations, it seemed that such a result was to be expected. Porthik Eesyan explained why to Hunt while they were observing some of the test runs to multiport molecules. It was several days since the Tramline group's arrival. The introductory tours and demonstrations of the Multiporter, as the project had come to be designated, were over. The combined team were getting down to business. Hunt and Eesyan were both physically there, not neurally coupled in remotely to a composite creation. Experimenters couldn't do much real experimenting in one of VISAR's virtual-world settings.

  "Is your head in a mood for big numbers today, Vic?" Eesyan stood over a foot taller than Hunt, dark gray, almost black in hue, his torso covered by a loose-fitting coat that reached to the knees, brightly colored in an elaborate woven design. Ganymeans did not posses hair, but the skin at the tops of their heads roughened into a ribbed, scaly texture, a bit like candlewick, that could range through as many color combinations and hues as bird plumage. Eesyan's was blue and green, taking on streaks of orange toward the rear.

  "I'm ready to risk it. Try me," Hunt said.

  "Multiverse branches really are as thin as some of us have speculated. In theory, they could differ by as little as a single quantum transition. There could be as many of them as the number of discrete quantum transitions in the entire lifetime of the universe. Pick anything you like for the number of zeros. It won't make any difference that matters."

  Hunt pursed his lips in a silent whistle while he thought about it.

  Considering the enormity of what it implied, the Multiporter was really quite a modest piece of hardware as Thurien constructions went. The projection chamber itself, which was where the actual multiporting happened, took the unremarkable form of a square metal housing about the size of a microwave oven, upon which an array of shiny tubes converged at various angles from pieces of equipment mounted in a supporting framework extending around the sides, overhead, and into a bay beneath. A forest of sensors and instrumentation filling the remainder of the framework, a worktop and monitoring station, several desks, and banks of conduits, tubes, and other connections disappearing behind the walls and down through the floor completed the scene. The chamber at the center was where matter was being induced to disappear into other realities. It was adequate for the type of experiments being conducted currently. Should success later lead to more ambitious attempts involving larger objects, it was anticipated that a scaled-up Multiporter would be operated out in space, away from Thurien. Eesyan already had some designers looking into it. Short-term budget cutting was meaningless in a system that had no concept nor need of cost accounting.

  A volume of space inside the chamber was also where the attempts were being made to detect matter multiported from other realities. By the bizarre logic of the situation, if other nearby selves were multiporting matter out of their universe using their version of the same equipment, then it seemed to follow that this would be the place to look for it in this universe. Hence, the Multiporter'
s time was divided between operating in sending and detecting modes. This raised the question that if their other selves were working to the same schedule, nobody would detect anything because they would all be sending when no one was looking, and looking when no one was sending. The answer adopted was to use a local quantum randomizer to switch between modes. Assuming their counterparts would think the same thing, the idea was that random generators driven by a different sequence of quantum processes-which was what, by definition, made a different reality different-would yield a different pattern of switching times, giving periods of overlap between modes of sending from one universe and attempting detection in another. The negative outcome had caused this line of supposition to be reexamined without any obvious flaw turning up, but Eesyan was now saying there were other reasons why it was to be expected.

  A "segment" was the term that had been given to a "vertical" slice of the Multiverse-a self-contained universe that beings like Thuriens and humans inhabited, and within which change in the form of an ordering of events was perceived to happen. In terms of the not really accurate but more easily visualized analogy of pages in a book, it appeared that the pages were astoundingly thin. "It seems to be the way some people guessed," Eesyan confirmed. "A particle traveling through a segment would exist in it for a vanishingly short time, making it indistinguishable from background quantum noise. Impossible to detect in practice."

  Hunt had hoped for some kind of bulk averaging effect whereby individual quantum events would seldom give rise to any discernible difference at higher, more macroscopic levels. That would, in effect, have made the pages thicker. But he wasn't about to argue with VISAR over a matter of computation. "Do macroscopic probabilities get bigger?" he asked Eesyan. In other words, would larger objects take longer to traverse a segment, making their detection easier?