“That doesn’t make sense!” he objected loudly. “If it is a closed ring, how did they put us inside the ring?”
Merlin shook his head at him. “It wasn’t closed—not until after they put you inside. Then they formed the last portal to close the ring.”
Paul put his hands to his temples to try to lessen the headache developing there. “Merlin, three portals that close together—we would be coming out the last one before they could seal the ring closed!”
“You are thinking too small,” Merlin countered. “True, portal transport is nearly instantaneous. But if the 2nd portal is a fraction of an inch beyond the first, that introduces a time delay in transit, perhaps a few milliseconds long.”
“A few milliseconds?” Paul asked. And then it hit him. If one transition from the first portal to the second could delay a transport by milliseconds, what would it take to delay total transport through the entire ring by several seconds?
“It’s a ring of thousands of portals,” Paul breathed in disbelief. “But the energy required—”
“Would be enormous,” Merlin finished for him. “I am almost positive that I said that already. Errabêlu would need a lot of very powerful talismans or one really huge talisman.”
“The Earth’s upper mantle,” Paul said, dropping the last piece of the puzzle into place. “Of course, that explains the tornadoes, the hailstones and the earthquakes! Zounds! The energy required!” He glanced around the entire location. “And the air?”
“Was trapped with you when you entered the portal,” Merlin added. “And, strictly speaking, this pocket universe is not completely sealed. There are the gaps between portals. That will let in a little light and air, although probably not much.”
Paul frowned. “Then why does it not let in gravity too?”
“Sir?” Rachael 222 (1982, Blade Runner) asked, floating a few yards away.
Paul noticed then that their discussion had drawn the attention of most of the Scotties.
“You have a question, Rachael?” Paul asked.
“If Merlin’s hypothesis is correct, is there any reason it has to be a ring of portals?”
Paul blinked. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“We have created multi-ended portals before, Dad,” she pointed out. “Theoretically, you could create a whole series of Y portals and link them together in several geometric forms. Or X portals, for that matter.”
“Oh!” reacted Tima 333. “Like a cube?”
“Or a triangular prism?” asked Andy 444.
“Or perhaps a decahedron, or a dodecahedron, or a—” volunteered Leela 555.
Paul held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, everybody, we get the idea.” He turned to Rachael. “What does that have to do with gravity?”
“Well, Dad, if we are in some incredibly complex polyhedron, then the direction of gravity would be dependent on which portal leg of the geometric form we are moving through. And if we are moving among a lot of different legs of the geometric form—”
“Then all the various vectors of gravity would cancel out, leaving us weightless,” Paul concluded, noting with admiration how simple the answer was, as soon as it was explained to him. “Very good, Rachael 222.”
“Smart thinking,” Merlin added, winking at the Scottie. He turned back to Paul. “Okay, so you know where you are now. How do you get out?”
Paul looked around at all the Scotties, floating near him. He could sense their faith in him. They expected him to pull a rabbit out of the hat, or, in this case, to come up with a bright idea that would extract them from imprisonment in a pocket universe.
Paul rubbed his jaw. “‘When confronted with a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to this question: How would the Lone Ranger handle this?’”
Ω
They discussed ideas for hours without coming to any significant conclusions. And they tried a variety of spells, especially experimenting with different portal spells, trying to find something that would help them escape. Nothing significant came from their experiments.
Even worse, Merlin informed them that the pocket universe could not sustain itself forever, that at some time in the future, it would collapse and disintegrate. The effects on anything living trapped inside would be fatal. The whole situation reminded Paul of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Remember Me” where Wesley Crusher accidently trapped his mother in a warp bubble, which slowly collapsed inward on her. Of course, in the end, she managed to escape unharmed. Paul was not so sanguine concerning their circumstances. In their case, they didn’t have The Traveler to help out in a pinch. Paul’s sense of impending disaster disheartened him.
At his insistence, he and the Scotties took a brief break, to collect their thoughts before they tried again.
Floating by himself for a minute left him time to think of the outside world. What was happening out there? Had Daneel 1 and 4th Brigade of 1st Division, I Corps managed to drill down to the lower mantle? Had they stopped Errabêlu and then hopefully captured the evil wizards? Or had the worst happened, and Errabêlu had won the battle, imprisoning most, if not all, of the Scotties into pocket universes like this one? The uncertainty gnawed grievously at him. More than anything else, Paul wanted to find a way out of this trap, to return to the real world and continue the fight. The hopelessness of the situation only served to feed his feeling of despair and misery. There had to be a way out of this trap, there just had to be!
Paul did not want to spend the last few hours or days of his life spinning round and round in circles inside a pattern of portals!
Round and round in circles. Hmm. The tiny man at the back of his head was at it again. A tiny voice was trying to tell him something. Paul reached forward to grasp the idea, only to have it slip beyond his reach. He pounded his head with the palms of both hands but it did no good. The idea disappeared entirely.
Geez! Even his own subconscious mind was working against him!
Another idea occurred to him, a devious one. He rubbed his jaw. It might work.
Paul waved a hand. “In the names of Deanna Troi, Dr. Peter Silberman, and Dr. Alfred Bellows, may a virtual reality avatar of myself be created, to truthfully answer all questions of my conscious and unconscious mind.”
A visual copy of himself formed a few feet away, but rotated at a 45 degree angle, staring indifferently off in another direction, into empty space.
With a tweak of his fingers, the avatar aligned itself in his plane and facing him.
Arcee 77 drifted closer, apparently curious. “Dad, what is going on?”
Paul held up a hand to silence her. “Paul Armstead, do you know who I am?”
Like a zombie, the avatar nodded slowly. Without any emotional inflection at all, the image of himself answered. “You are the real Paul Armstead.”
Paul nodded. “And do you know where we are?”
“Yes. We are trapped inside a complex geometric three dimensional shape composed of trans-spatial portals.”
“That’s correct.” Paul cocked his head to one side not knowing what to expect for an answer to his next question. “Do you remember a few minutes ago, an idea that nearly formed in our subconscious mind, an idea that might have helped us escape from this trap?”
“Yes, of course,” the avatar replied impassively. “In your subconscious, you were comparing yourself to a hamster running inside a spinning cage.”
The mental image came forcefully to his conscious mind, and Paul instantly realized that this indeed was the idea that had tickled his mental processes a few minutes earlier. But he failed to see how hamsters would help their situation.
“Why did I think of hamsters?” Paul asked.
“Because hamsters in a cage makes you think of water wheels and those make you think of electric generators,” the avatar answered.
Stunned, Paul’s jaw dropped open. Geez, he could be such a first class idiot!
He waved a hand and the avatar disappeared.
“What was
all that about?” Arcee 77 asked.
“Get everyone over here,” Paul grimly ordered. “I know how to break us out of this trap now.”
Ω
Crowded together, the Scotties and Merlin waited patiently for Paul to explain his idea.
He told them of his mental image of hamsters and how it compared with an electric generator.
“But Dad,” Omega 777 protested. “We are not in an electric generator! And even if we were, how would that help?”
“Patience, grasshopper,” Paul said, eliciting a snicker from all the Scotties present. “We aren’t generating electricity. That is true. But our constant passage through all these portals is generating something else!”
“Neutrinos!” chorused several Scotties at once.
“Sure but how does that help?” Rachael 222 asked.
“If we string ourselves out in a long line, each of us can map the level of neutrinos we generate as our bodies transit through the various portals,” Paul explained. “Not all the portals will be equal. Some will generate neutrinos with different energy levels than others. It will take some computational power on our part, but eventually we can map the entire portal structure of our pocket universe.”
“And this will help how, exactly?” Merlin asked, looking a bit puzzled.
“We only need to break one portal link in the entire structure to let us escape,” Paul told them smugly. “If we know how the structure is built, we can focus all of our efforts on one portal link. Break that and we escape.”
The Scotties all grew hands and arms and clapped for joy.
Merlin beamed from ear to ear. “Taught that boy everything he knows! Does an old man proud, so he does!”
Ω
It did take a while. Fortunately, the geometric shape was less complex than Paul feared. A hectohexecontadihedron with 306 portals. However, there were a large number of possible trans-portal pathways. Errabêlu could have shoved them down enough of these pathways and kept them away from the open doorway until they were ready to close and lock it shut. It all made sense.
The Scotties did all the hard math, since they were, in essence, computers. Their calculations also identified what they believed to be the weakest portal length in the entire structure.
In order to focus their energies on that one portal, they again strung themselves out in a single line, one aligned with the shortest pathway around the hectohexecontadihedron using the least number of portals possible but a pathway that included their target portal. Then they began moving quickly through that pathway, achieving a fairly significant speed. As it happened, a Scottie passed through that portal every half second.
Timing their passage, each Scottie that passed through the portal cast a burst of magical energy at the exact moment of passage. The stress placed on that portal began to accumulate, especially since the entire structure was weakening with age anyway.
Paul yelled, “‘Full power! Give me everything you’ve got!’”
“‘If I were holding anything back, I would tell you!’” simultaneously chorused the Scotties, quoting Lennier’s response to Sheridan in the Babylon 5 episode “Messages From Earth.”
In less than five minutes, the portal link broke, revealing an access to the outside world.
The Scotties began to scramble madly, diving through the open portal in wild abandon. Paul stopped to help pull through some of the injured and unconscious units.
When it was his turn, Paul was no less enthusiastic to see the real world again.
His exit through the portal left him crawling in wet green grass. As he got to his feet, Paul found he was only a few yards away from several graves. Glancing around, he recognized the cemetery as the Stonewall Memory Gardens, a couple of miles south of Stony Ridge.
The sky above them was blue and clear of cloud formations.
Paul turned to Arcee 77, a few yards away, who he noticed was hovering near the grave of US Congressman Jay W. Johnson.
“Let me know when you have a link with anyone else,” Paul requested, as he looked around the cemetery again, noting how quiet and peaceful everything seemed to be. Internally, he was vastly relieved at their escape, indeed almost euphoric. “We’ve been out of contact for nearly a day. It would seem things have been happening in the meantime.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Paris, France
Castille Paris Hotel, Duplex Suite
33 – 37 rue Cambon
Friday, 7:02 a.m. CEST
June
The early morning sun was just beginning to peak through the gaps in the window drapes. Paul lay fully stretched out in bed, enjoying the luxurious feel of the sheets, and the sublime softness of the pillow. Most of all, of course, he enjoyed having Capie at his side, snuggled up warmly against him, her left hand on his chest, as she softly breathed in his left ear. His degree of happiness and contentment seemed to know no bounds.
Too bad his wife was still asleep. Well, it wouldn’t be long before she woke up.
Paul was glad that the last three days were behind them now and, starting the previous evening, that the two of them were now enjoying a well-earned vacation.
When they—meaning 1st Division, I Corps and Paul—had escaped from the pocket universe trap on Saturday, they did indeed discover that many things had happened.
First, Daneel 1, Gort 737 and 4th Brigade had, to be sure, drilled 650 miles straight down and managed to tap the power of Earth’s lower mantle, far larger than the upper mantle and thus a far greater source of energy for their magical spells. It had been a very near thing. Errabêlu had managed to imprison nearly thirty thousand Scotties in pocket universes scattered around the area, and to injure and incapacitate a few thousand more. With Paul’s disappearance, Daneel 1 had been on the verge of canceling the operation entirely, on his own authority. It was only the rapid progress of the crustal drill that had encouraged the Scottie to stay in the fight for as long as he had.
With their one major advantage negated, Errabêlu’s resistance collapsed and the remaining Scotties were able to quickly surround Stony Ridge, closing off all avenues of escape and capturing over a hundred wizards and ten thousand Oni. All of the captives were stripped of their talismans and moved to the Azkaban prison, now guarded by several battalions of Scotties. The back of the organization was broken now, Errabêlu’s existence a thing of the past.
For nearly a day following the battle, Daneel 1 and the remaining Scotties had searched relentlessly for Paul and the missing Scottie units. Capie had been contacted, of course, and had rushed to help in the search. The nature of the pocket universe traps were unknown to them, so they had no real idea of where to look. Attempts were made to interrogate the captive wizards of Errabêlu but, as it turned out, most of those individuals did not know the secret either. Only a few of the Conclave within Errabêlu possessed that knowledge. And not one of them had been captured.
While thousands of Scotties were searching for Paul, other thousands were recovering the injured from the battlefield. The butcher’s bill was terribly high. 4,321 Scotties sustained injuries to one degree or another, 432 of them would require major work including new hardware components for their repair. And 43 Scotties suffered catastrophic damage and would need a complete rebuild of their hardware and reconstruction of their personalities using their stored backup memory files. That part still saddened Paul the most.
After his escape and armed with the knowledge of how to find and break open the pocket universes, Daneel 1 led the search efforts himself. The good news was that he had been able to find all the missing Scotties, including the pocket universe, nearly on the verge of collapse, containing Bishop 911 and his platoon. Fortunately, none of the platoon was injured, only badly frightened. It would take a few weeks to put everyone back to rights, especially the 43 Scotties that needed a virtually complete rebuild.
The worst part of the last three days was the tongue-lashing that Capie had given him, for heading off into the heart of the battle. He endured it as st
oically and as quietly as he could. After all, he understood in his heart that she scolded him out of her love for him and out of her fear of nearly having lost him. She had every right to be mad at him.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, Paul felt that he had made the right move. Had he not personally joined the battle, he might never have discovered the nature of the pocket universes that Errabêlu had created. At the very least, Paul would have lost Bishop, his platoon, Jarvis 186 and most of I Corps, 1st Division, and probably would have lost a lot of other Scotties from the other divisions as well, before those that were left could have secured a proper withdrawal. And without knowing how they were trapped and without his having access to the area, all those captured Scotties would likely have died when their pocket universes collapsed a couple of days later.
Moreover, the war might have stalemated then and there, with Errabêlu still in control of most of the other countries. That outcome would have been a pathway to disaster.
So yeah, Paul had made the right choice. However, he found it prudent not to argue any of that with Capie.
Some additional bad news arrived the previous evening from Daneel 1. He had opened a microportal to the hotel and displayed his image for Paul on a small 32 inch view screen. Paul remembered his exact words, quoting as he did from the Star Trek episode “Space Seed.”
“Dad,” Daneel 1 said, “‘I have collected some names and made some counts. By my estimate, there were some 80 or 90 of these young supermen unaccounted for when they were finally defeated. Would you reveal to war-weary populations that some 80 Napoleons might still be alive?’”
Of course, Paul had already known that they had not captured all of the Errabêlu wizards. But he had not known that there were that many missing!
The organization itself might be defunct, but the war would go on, at least until they could capture more of those missing wizards. The one thing he was sure of was that they would not be found in interstellar space on a nuclear-powered DY-100 class ship!
The Genie and the Engineer 3: Ravages of War Page 26
