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 a different 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 were, at Quelsang, 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. Violation of mass-energy conservation was being demonstrated—at least, as applying within a single universe. Its superseding by a more comprehensive principle of conservation across the Multiverse was now necessitated by scientifically established fact.
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."
"And yet still be a complete, discrete universe—existing in its own right?"
"According to VISAR's calculations, yes." Eesyan paused to underline the implication. "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. There was some spectacular engineering in the adjoining parts of the building and on the floor below, true enough, but most of it was to do with standard Thurien g-technology based on constraining dense masses to move in curved paths at high speeds. 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."
This time, it seemed, Hunt had been wrong. He 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? Hunt didn't know if "size" in the normal sense meant anything when traveling across universes.
"Not significantly," Eesyan answered. "Multiporting propagation is fast." He made a tossing-away motion with his six-fingered hand. "But we're working toward sending larger configurations of matter. We will upgrade the detectors to look for the same kind of thing, too, anyway. You never know. We might glimpse something passing through."
Hunt rested his elbows on the guard rail in front of them and snorted in a way that said this still took some effort to believe. By the strange reasoning that guided the planning, there would be little point in looking for objects from next door that they were not themselves yet in a position to send. He stared up at the resonator mountings, where the tubes emerged from overhead. That was where the energy was imparted and the matrix waves—"M-waves," by the terminology being formulated—generated to initiate the multiporting process. Thurien technicians assisted by maintenance robots were working on parts of the equipment. Josef was up there, too, with Chien, hovering in a Thurien gravitic bubble, to see what they could learn.
"So what happens finally to the extended structures that you've been sending?" Hunt asked Eesyan. "The molecular configurations."
"We've no way of knowing for sure. From what we can tell, they just keep going and disperse as an expanding wave function."
Hunt nodded distantly. How, then, had the relay device that had appeared in Earth orbit been able to maintain itself there long enough to initiate and support a dialogue? Did it mean that only objects that were complex enough to contain some means of "stopping" themselves somehow could be multiported into another reality in the meaningful sense of being able to stay there?
"There's a lot to be done yet," Eesyan said, as if reading his thoughts.
"Well, our other selves somewhere seem to have managed it." Hunt straightened up from the rail and flexed his arms. Thurien gravity was slightly less than Earth's, which had an invigorating effect. "We're not going to let them outdo us, are we, Porthik? This is where it gets interesting."
"Terrans," Eesyan said resignedly.
At that moment, VISAR came though via avco in Hunt's head to say he had a call from Mildred. Since it was disconcerting—and certainly not the best of manners—for someone to suddenly start talking to thin air when they were with company, VISAR would have announced the event to Eesyan, too. Such courtesies were not possible on Earth, where most people didn't have avcos behind their ears, which was another reason why Hunt generally refrained from using his when back home. Those who did were not the kind who worried unduly about manners anyway. He accepted, and Mildred appeared as a framed head and shoulders superposed in his visual field.
"Victor, hello. And how is the . . . what do you call it . . . multiporting . . . lab?" She had decided it would all be beyond her, and instead gone off with Danchekker somewhere in Thurios to meet some of the Thuriens that she wanted to get to know in connection with her book.
"It makes our national labs back home look like alchemy shops," Hunt replied. "And they got it up and running in less time than we'd have had committees arguing about it. How's it with the sociologists?"
"Oh, unbelievably useful! They're all so helpful! It's as if they have all the time in the world and nothing is so important that it can't be interrupted. Or is it just their way of being polite? I haven't really decided which yet. At first I thought it was a result of their ideas of what we'd call economics—or absence of them. You know what I mean—when anyone can have unlimited anything, you'd think that spending your life trying to get more would cease to mean anything, wouldn't you? But then, it isn't that way with us at all, is it? The more people get, it seems the meaner and nastier they become. I always found it was the poorest people who had nothing who were the most generous. So it must be something innately different in the Thurien nature."
The frame widened to include an image of Danchekker. "Get to the point," he muttered, at the same time sending Hunt a toothy grimace of a smile. "Vic, good day to you."
"So, what's up?" Hunt asked, taking the cue gratefully.
"Oh, I was just calling to remind you that it's close to ten," Mildred said.
"And?"
"You're due to meet us at ten."
"Where?"
"Well, not really actually 'meet.' . . . You know, in one of those couplers, or whatever you call them."
"What for?"
Mildred looked puzzled. "We arranged to go on a tour of VISAR space. You and Christian said you'd show me some Thurien planets, and we were going to say hello to the Ganymean friends of yours in the ship that's on Jevlen."
Hunt's brow furrowed. "There must be some confusion. I've no idea what you're talking about."
Danchekker interjected, "We called you this morning, Vic. The h-space tour, with a visit to the Shapieron."
Hunt searched back through his memory but could recall nothing. He shook his head helplessly. "Well, sure, I'll come along, no problem. It would be great to see Garuth and his people again. And I'm sure you mean it. But I honestly never said anything about this."
"Well, we're about ready to depart," Danchekker said. "But we'll wait until you get yourself organized." He sounded a trifle irritable, as if he didn't believe Hunt's denial and saw it as a somewhat lame excuse for having forgotten.
"I'll be right there," Hunt said, and cleared down. He looked back at Eesyan. "Would you excuse me? Chris and Mildred are asking if I could join them at short notice about something."
"As you wish," Eesyan replied.
"Where are the nearest couplers?"
"There's one right here ." Eesyan indicated a partitioned space next to the monitoring panels. "It's free now."
Hunt took his leave and entered. He felt a little irked by Danchekker's attitude of uncompromising certainty, when it was obvious there was some kind of mixup. Could he really be getting that doddery? he asked himself. But the flicker of doubt passed. No, the downhill bike ride felt smooth and reassuring, without wobbles, he decided as he eased himself back into the recliner. He hadn't forgotten anything.