One of the things about working for Gregg Caldwell that suited Hunt was that Caldwell was able to function within a large bureaucracy without acquiring the mind-set of one. Through his career as a nucleonics scientist in England before joining UNSA, Hunt had found that small groups of capable and dedicated individuals were more effective than the armies assembled for large, managerially inaugurated research projects, where too much energy tended to be dissipated fruitlessly on communicating more and more about less and less. Caldwell expressed it succinctly by saying, "If a ship takes five days to cross the Atlantic, it doesn't mean that five ships will do it in one day." Danchekker was necessarily led to the same philosophy, since the number of people he was typically able to tolerate limited the effective horizons of his personal work space in any case.
The team hastily organized in the course of the following week comprised just four more people in addition to the two senior scientists, Hunt being nominally designated the head, since the subject was Multiverse physics, and physics was—literally—his department. Accompanying him would be Duncan Watt, his longstanding assistant from the Navcomms days, who had also moved to Goddard, while Danchekker in like fashion would be taking Sandy Holmes, one of the few individuals to have mastered his filing system, and who could decipher his notes. Duncan and Sandy had also accompanied Hunt and Danchekker to Jevlen on the investigation of mass psychoses that had led to the discovery of the Entoverse. Josef Sonnebrandt had been recruited without too much persuasion. And he in turn had urged for the inclusion of a Chinese theoretician that he had been working with, a Madam Xyen Chien, who had set up a laboratory in Xinjiang that was already duplicating some aspects of earlier Ganymean physics involving artificial spacetime deformation. Direct as always, Caldwell had contacted her personally, and she had as good as agreed before the end of his call. The rest had been pretty straightforward. Although China still retained some vestige of the authoritarianism of times gone by, nobody there was going to argue with an invitation to send one of their leading scientists to Thurien. In fact, Madam Xyen was on the list that the party of Thuriens currently in eastern Asian had arranged to visit, and she would be returning with them directly to the orbiting Ishtar to meet the rest of the Terran group there. UNSA administration needed a name for the project. Since the aim was to investigate TRAns Muliverse communication, Hunt settled on "Tramline."
Sonnebrandt joined the rest of the group at Goddard a day before the Ishtar's scheduled departure for an overview and briefing. They flew out early the next morning to be shuttled up to orbit from the UNSA launch terminal in Virginia. As fate would have it, the flight up turned out to be the same one that the travel agency had booked for Mildred, who was also traveling from the DC area. "What a wonderful surprise, Christian!" she declared when she came aboard, festooned with bags and purses, and found them there. "You were holding back on me. You had this planned all along!"
"What can I tell you?" Danchekker answered. Which was as good a way as any of saying something while saying nothing.
Thurien interstellar transportation worked on the same basis as their communications, which involved spinning artificially generated charged black holes up to speeds that drew them out into toroids. The singularity deformed to become aperture through the center, which could be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects and gave access to the hyperrealm known as h-space that connected the universe (or, more strictly now, "our" universe, out of the countless universes making up the Multiverse) by paths that bypassed the limitations of ordinary spacetime. The difference, however, was that while communications could be effected via microscopic-size ports located conveniently close to Earth in satellites or, at the cost of some heavy structural engineering, down on the surface, transportation required ports large enough to admit whatever was being transported. Projecting such ports where and when they were needed was on of the things that VISAR handled as part of its function as general manager of the infrastructure that the Thurien civilization rested on. The energy to create the toroids was also directed through h-space, produced by the consumption of matter from the cores of burnt-out stars at colossal generating systems constructed in older parts of the local galaxy. Projecting transportation-size ports into planetary systems would have produced gravitational disturbances sufficient to create havoc with clocks and calendars. Standard practice was therefore to project them far enough away outside for such effects to be negligible. Hence, vessels were needed to get to them. Thurien interstellar craft used regular gravitic drives—essentially the principle that the Shapieron had been built around—to travel to an entry port, and from the exit port to the final destination. This meant that a typical point-to point journey between star systems would take in the order of a few days.
The Thurien craft that took Hunt and the earlier group to Jevlen had been immense—more in the nature of a mini artificial world that Thuriens used for long stays in remote parts of the Galaxy, and in which some chose to reside permanently. The Ishtar, by contrast, was more in keeping with what most Terrans would have thought of as the dimensions of a "ship." It grew larger on the forward display screen inside the cabin as the shuttle from Virginia closed: bright yellow-gold in color, sleek and streamlined, flaring out into two crossed, curvy delta forms at the tail, designed like most Thurien craft for descent through planetary atmospheres without the rigmarole of intermediate transfers in orbit. At Earth, however, the several planned surface bases with facilities to service them were still under construction. In the meantime, there was no need for such clumsy provisions as fitting Thurien and Terran vessels with compatible docking hardware. The Ishtar simply projected a force shell from its docking-port side to enclose a zone between itself and the shuttle, and filled it with air. The passengers were conveyed across the intervening space, open to the void and the stars, by similar means, on an invisible conveyor—somewhat unnerving for first-timers, but fast and easy. With the larger Thurien craft things were even simpler: they contained internal docking bays that opened to admit the entire surface shuttle, capable of accommodating a dozen or more at a time.
A small reception committee of Thuriens was waiting to greet the arrivals inside the entry port. The first formality was to issue each of the Terrans with a flesh-colored disk about the size of a dime that attached behind the ear and coupled into the neural system to provide an audio-visual link to VISAR, which could then act as interpreter. The devices were known as "avcos"—for audio-visual coupler—and could be used down on Earth where equipment existed that could communicate with the orbiting Thurien h-space relays. This was true at Goddard, and Hunt still had one of the devices in his desk drawer from his last trip. But for little better reason than habit, he preferred to stick to a regular old-fashioned seefone when he was at home. A few people there wore their Thurien avco disks ostentatiously as a status symbol, making great shows of removing, reattaching, and pretending to clean them.
"Welcome back, Vic," the familiar voice of VISAR said, seemingly in his ear but actually activated inside his head. "I see you're getting restless again." The disk also projected images into the visual field when required. This wasn't the full Thurien total-neural experience, but it afforded universal voice communication to anywhere, with supplementary visuals that could be generated from the optical neuronics of senders using their eyes effectively as TV cameras. Once it caught on, it would be the end of the line for the Terran phone business, Hunt supposed.
"Hello, VISAR. Yes, we're back in your territory again." Hunt faced the waiting Thuriens. "So who have we here?"
The deputation was headed by the Ishtar's first officer, Bressin Nylek, who had come to pay compliments on behalf of the ship's commander. It seemed that Calazar had sent a note personally to make sure that Hunt's party was well taken care of. Madam Xyen Chien was aboard and would join them after they had settled in. As was normal Thurien practice by now with vessels sent to Earth, a section of the ship had been adapted for Terran tastes and proportions—the average Ganymean was around eight feet tall. After taking them there, the Thuriens would stop by the lounge area later.
"Who is this VISAR that I'm hearing from?" Mildred inquired, looking around after experimenting with her disk. "Are you the driver?"
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say," VISAR answered, coming in on everyone's circuit since she had made the question general.
"Can you tell me about Lynx? Is she all right? She came up in her case with the baggage."
"Who's Lynx?" Hunt asked subvocally.
"Her cat," VISAR returned. Then, in a more public-sounding voice, "Never better. A steward will bring her to your cabin."
"Ah, splendid. I couldn't leave her in Washington. I know nobody there would have fed her correctly. She's very highly strung and diet-sensitive, you know."
"God help us all," Hunt heard Danchekker mutter, turning his head away.
As in their cities back home, the Thuriens also employed their gravitic technology to shape the environments inside their spacecraft. Since "up" and "down" could be defined locally and vary progressively from place to place, interiors didn't conform to the layers-of-boxes theme reflected in practically all Terran designs regardless of the attempts to disguise it. Everything merged in a confusion of corridors, shafts, and intersecting spaces, surfaces that served as floors in one place curving to become walls somewhere else with no sense of rotation as one passed from one to the other. Through it all, Thuriens were being conveyed unconcernedly this way and that on by currents of force similar to that which had brought the new arrivals across from the shuttle, traversing the ship in all directions like invisible elevators. But when they came to the Terran section of the ship, everything suddenly became rectilinear, verticality reasserted itself, and recognizable walls and floors emerged around corridors leading past lines of doors. Because that was what Terrans were used to, and how they liked things to be.
Hunt's bags had already arrived in his cabin when the party's Thurien escorts delivered him to the door. VISAR could have guided them, of course, but the personal touch was nice—presumably a part of the crew's response to Calazar's prompting. The interior was comfortable and showed the usual Thurien knack for thinking of everything, Hunt saw as he deposited the office case that he had carried with him and hung his overjacket in the closet. A coffeepot and ingredients stood on a side table, and a robe and slippers were laid out in the bathroom. He came back out to the main room of the cabin and checked the selection of drinks and snacks in the cold storage by the coffeemaker and cabinet above. "Aha, gotcha, VISAR," he murmured. "You're slipping. No Guinness."
"On tap at the bar in the lounge area," the computer replied. Hunt sighed and went back out to find the lounge area, where he had arranged to meet Josef Sonnebrandt.
Sonnebrandt was already there, sitting in an armchair at a corner table with an Oriental woman that Hunt recognized from pictures accompanying various writings of hers that he had read as Xyen Chien. Danchekker and Mildred were a short distance away with two Thuriens who seemed to be the focus of Mildred's attentions. A number of other Terrans that Hunt hadn't met were also dispersed around the room, many of them again Asian. Apparently, a group was going back with the Ishtar to reciprocate the Thurien visit. The bar was appropriately stocked with Eastern beers, wines, other beverages, and foods too, Hunt noticed.
The German stood as Hunt joined them—a gesture one didn't see very often these days. He was medium in height and build, with a somewhat overgrown mane of dark, curly hair, dressed casually in a khaki bush shirt with chest pockets and epaulettes, and over it a Western style brown leather vest. "Dr. Hunt. We meet face to face at last," he greeted. "So this is a Thurien starship. You have been in them before, of course. At least, we will remain sane in this part of it, yes? Out there is like being carried through an Escher drawing."
Madam Xyen was perhaps around fifty, as far as Hunt could judge, allowing for the tendency he'd noticed for Orientals to look younger than Westerners thought they should. Her hair was tied high, secured by a jeweled silver clip, and she wore a plain lilac dress with a dark blue shoulder cape. She had a composed air about her, taking in Hunt with a long, penetrating look from dark, depthless eyes that seemed to read everything that external appearances could convey; but her face softened into an easy enough smile when he introduced himself. Hunt's first impression was of a person totally in control, who saw the world for precisely what it was, without pretensions or delusions, and revealed back to it in turn just as much of herself and her thoughts as she chose to.
A four-foot-high serving robot floating a few inches above the floor on some kind of Thurien g-cushion arrived at the table to ask Hunt what it could get for him. He settled for a pot of green Chinese tea and an Indonesian dish that sounded like a spicy meat-and- vegetable pita bread sandwich. "Do you have a name we should use?" he asked the table attendant.
"No, sir. Such has never been the custom." Uncannily, whatever was guiding it reproduced a perfect Jeeves intonation.
"Then from now on, you are . . ." Hunt eyed its silvery metallic curves, carrying tray, and manipulator appendages thoughtfully for a moment, "Vercingetorix. . . . No, wait, Sir Vercingetorix. Aptly to be known as Sir Ver. What do you think?"
"As you wish, sir."
Chien chuckled delightedly. "Brilliant," Sonnebrandt, acknowledged, raising his glass toward Hunt. It looked as if it contained a lager beer.
"Is this one of your sidelines, VISAR?" Hunt inquired as the robot glided Jeevishly away.
"I suppose you could say, a distant cousin," VISAR replied in his head. "Mainly locally autonomous, but when it gets hit with something like that, it checks back with me."
After some initial socializing, the conversation got down to the business at hand. The first thing that Sonnebrandt and Chien wanted to hear was Hunt's account of the encounter with his alter ego in his own words. It was one of the few occasions when Hunt regretted not availing himself of the option to keep a recorded log of his phone exchanges in the way many people did. Maybe it had something to do with his English upbringing, but it always seemed to him to smack of lawsuit phobia, security paranoia, and other practices of the neurotic society now fading into history. It was persistently rumored that the communications companies still kept copies of everything that flowed through their channels anyway, but requests from the top levels of UNSA, stressing the importance of the matter, had produced only apologetic denials and assurance that the claim was an urban legend from way back that just wouldn't die. He went through what had been said during the exchange and all the analyses that had been repeated since, and gave his reasons for believing that the device had been an unmanned relay injected into orbit. His tea and snack arrived while he was talking.
"The analogy with the Dirac sea is interesting," Chien said when Hunt had finished. He had reiterated in his communications with Sonnebrandt the point he had made with Caldwell, and Sonnebrandt had passed it on to Chien. "Propagation in the manner of the Jevlenese processing matrix very well could explain pair production and annihilation." The same thought had occurred to Hunt and Sonnebrandt.
"What do we know about the actual propagation mechanics?" Chien asked. "Can we say anything yet about the kind of physics involved? What is it that actually switches 'states'?"
"I've got a hunch that it results from a longitudinal mode of what we observe as electromagnetic radiation," Sonnebrandt said. "I've been playing around with the possible implications. I think this might be it." Hunt and Chien were aware that the standard forms of Maxwell's equations only yielded a transverse vibration. They described electric and magnetic fields varying in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the wave's motion, like waves traveling along a jiggled rope, or a cork bobbing up and down as a water wave passes by. There was nothing comparable to waves of alternating compression and rarefaction in the direction of propagation, as occurs with sound, for example.
"Would that mean we're talking about a comparable velocity, too?" Hunt asked.
Sonnebrandt shook his head. "Not necessarily. The velocity constant c comes out of the differential equations that apply to the kind of changing universe that we perceive. Longitudinal propagation would involve a different set of magnitudes entirely. The same underlying matrix, but completely different physics—in the way that water can carry both sound waves and surface waves. But they're totally different phenomena." Hunt nodded. It was about what he'd told Caldwell.
"What about these 'convergences' that this other version of you mentioned?" Chien asked. "They sounded important. Have you been able to make anything more of what he meant?"
"Not really," Hunt confessed. "At first I wondered if it was a reference to this line of thinking that we're talking about here—matrix propagation—converging with the h-space approach that the Thuriens have been experimenting with, but that seems too vague. We pretty well know that much already. As you just said, it sounds like something more important."
"I thought it might have referred to some kind of mathematical convergence, but I've found nothing that it could apply to," Sonnebrandt said.
"VISAR went through the equations that Josef sent, too," Hunt told both of them. "It couldn't come up with anything either." Sonnebrandt shrugged in a way that said he could add nothing to that.
"Then let's hope more turns up when we get together with the Thuriens," Chien concluded.
Hunt finished his snack and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Tell me more about this project you've got going with them out in the desert in Xinjiang," he said to Chien. He knew that the object was to set up an experimental tap into the Thurien h-space power grid with a view to later extending its availability on Earth. Misgivings had been voiced in some quarters about the economic implications.
"Perhaps the simplest thing would be for you to come and visit us and see it for yourself when we get back," Chien suggested.
"I'd like to," Hunt said. In fact, he had been thinking of trying to arrange just that. "What are the prospects of it coming into general use in the foreseeable future?" he asked. "Seriously. I've heard a lot of worried talk about it."
Chien smiled faintly in a distant kind of way that seemed very wise and worldly. "Worried talk in America?"
"Well, yes, sure. . . ."
"It will happen, Dr. Hunt. You can't turn the clock back. We will soon be immersed in an economy of universal abundance. It will be the end of the line for capitalism, which functions on the basis of manipulated scarcity. But it was inevitable eventually, even without the Thuriens. The world will just have to learn and get used to new ways of thinking a little sooner than they otherwise would have."
Hunt finished the last of his tea while he thought about that. It wasn't the first time he'd heard such sentiments expressed, but he wasn't sure if this would be the time to go into it with someone he hardly knew yet. He decided to keep things on the light side for now. "You should talk to Chris Danchekker's cousin," he said, indicating the table where Mildred was sitting. "From what he's told me, it sounds as if you'd have a lot in common there."
Chien straightened up in her seat. "Yes, I must do that. I haven't met them yet." She dropped her voice to a whisper. "I've been racing through one of her books since I learned she was coming with us. The one about how brainwashed and conditioned to political ideology professionals in corporations are. Very interesting and insightful. Have you read it?"
Hunt shook his head. "I'm afraid not. Come on over. I'll introduce you."
"Would you excuse me?" Chien said to Sonnebrandt.
"I'll be right back," Hunt told him.
"Of course. We'll talk more later." Sonnebrandt rose again as Chien got up to go with Hunt. Hunt wondered if this was going to be a permanent thing. As they moved away, Sonnebrandt beckoned Vercingetorix over and ordered another beer.
"And one for me," Hunt called back.
Hunt introduced Chien and told Mildred she was a fan. Mildred seemed delighted and flattered. Danchekker and the two Thuriens responded with appropriate pleasantries.
"Duncan and Sandy went off to explore the ship just before you came in," Danchekker told Hunt. Duncan and Sandy had been dating cozily since their return from the expedition to Jevlen. "It seemed like an excellent idea. We were just about to do likewise. Would you care to join us?"
"Just imagine, an alien starship!" Mildred enthused.
"Of course. How could I refuse?" Chien agreed. Hunt declined, saying that he had only left Sonnebrandt for a moment; in any case, he had seen enough of alien starships. After exchanging a few parting words and seeing them on their way, he went back to the other table.
"So you never married, I think you told me once?" Sonnebrandt said, leaning back and taking in the room.
"Never did."
"Never found the right woman, eh?"
"Oh, yes, pretty close, once or twice. Only trouble was, they were still looking for the right man. How about you?"
"Oh, I was once, some years ago now, but it didn't work out. They can be such demanding creatures. I thought marrying them would be enough. I didn't know you were supposed to live with them as well."
They talked about life in UNSA's scientific divisions compared to German academia. Sonnebrandt had worked for a while with the large European nucleonics facility near Geneva. In fact, he had met a number of Ganymeans from the Shapieron then, when they were accommodated in Switzerland during their stay on Earth. Although Hunt had been around at the time, their paths evidently hadn't crossed.
Sonnebrandt's work there had been on Multiverse interference experiments and the teleportation of quantum-entangled systems. At first, it had seemed to many people that this had to be the key to explaining how the Jevlenese ships had been hurled back to ancient Minerva, and more recently, following the media furor over the revelation at Owen's UNSA retirement dinner, the projection of the relay into this universe from whichever other one it had come from. But Hunt and Sonnebrandt agreed that quantum teleportation of the kind that was familiar in Terran laboratories and which the Thuriens used routinely in various ways wasn't the answer. The problem, in essence, was the impossibility in principle of being able to synchronize in advance any receiving apparatus at the other end, which was what enabled such effects to be achieved. Transporting to another universe would require something "self-contained" that could be "projected"—like sending a message in a bottle as opposed to transmitting to a tuned radio that was already there. But how did you get a bottle to go where you wanted it to, and then know enough to be able to announce itself when it was there? Clearly, a lot of onboard capability was indicated. But their counterparts in at least one place had managed to work it out—and on a time frame that seemed to have been amazingly short. The Hunt who had called via the relay hadn't looked noticeably older than the one who took the call.
"We'll start making progress all of a sudden when VISAR gets properly involved," Hunt said.
"You think so?"
"That would be my guess if I had to."
"What do you mean, 'properly'?" Sonnebrandt asked.
"New insights and intuition still seem to be a biological specialty," Hunt answered. "We don't know how we do it, so it's kind of difficult to specify the essence of it to a machine, however much it might be wrapped up in associative nets and learning algorithms. Induction doesn't come easily even to a Thurien system. But once you've given it the idea, it will run with it and tell you in minutes what does and doesn't follow from your assumptions. VISAR did an astounding job of authenticity faking the Pseudowar that panicked Broghuilio's Jevlenese. But it was us who suggested it in the first place."
"Who? You mean you and Chris Danchekker?"
"Oh, there was a bunch more involved, too, at the time. But all Terrans, yes. The Thuriens admitted that something like that would never have occurred to them. Devious thinking and deception isn't their thing."
Sonnebrandt touched a finger to the avco disk behind his ear. "Just out of curiosity, is VISAR tapping into this conversation?"
Hunt shook his head. "It doesn't eavesdrop. Thuriens are finicky about things like that."
"How do you know when it's online and when it isn't?"
"You learn to cue it. It's a knack that you pick up."
Sonnebrandt rubbed his fingertip lightly over the device, tracing its outline. "This isn't the Thurien total-sensory thing that people talk about, right?" he checked. "It's just an audio-visual subset. That's what avco means."
"You've never tried the full Thurien system?" Hunt was surprised. For some reason he imagined all major scientific establishments like the Max Planck Institute as having a Thurien neurocoupler or two hidden away somewhere. But Sonnebrandt shook his head. Hunt flipped the mental switch to raise VISAR. "I assume you've got couplers installed at various locations around the place?" he checked.
"Sure. It's a Thurien ship. Comes with all the fixings."
"Josef's never used one. Think we could give him an introductory ride?"
"No problem," VISAR replied. "Finish your beers, and I'll guide you to the nearest ones that are available right now."