The Infinity Link

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  The Tachylab transmitter could be recharged in less than twenty minutes for the outgoing signal; but the shipboard transmitter, being smaller and more compact, took nearly two hours to recharge. That meant at least a two-hour delay before he could resume a full link with Mozy. Two hours to rethink what he was doing. Two hours to avoid being questioned by Marshall or Fogelbee.

  His first thought was of coffee, but he didn't want to be caught in his office or in the staff lounge, either. All right, forget coffee. He was already walking down the outer corridor, and before he was conscious of making a decision, he had pushed open the side door, for a walk outside.

  He was the only soul around. Powdery-looking clouds were moving briskly across the late morning sky. The air was cool, but the sun shone brightly on the grass, and he took a deep breath and stuck his hands in his pockets, hunched his collar up around his neck to ward off the chill, and strode across the grass, down a gentle slope toward the woods and the chain-link fence encircling the grounds. From the bottom of the slope, he turned and gazed back at the institute.

  The central building dominated the view, in sharp juxtaposition with the mountainside rising up behind it. The building had always intrigued him, with its peculiar asymmetrical architecture that was so full of angles and flat surfaces. It was the large oblong tower jutting out from the southwest corner of the building that set it off—a symbolic fist of determination thrusting into the sky. In that tower was the tachyon-scanning equipment, and certain parts of the primary computer system. Kadin, in a sense, lived in that tower. It was quite beautiful, really: the tower erupting out of the building like some crytalline blossom, the entire architecture jutting upward against the trees and the mountain and the sky.

  Tucked away behind the main building were several other structures, including the tokamak fusion reactor dome, where power was generated for the tachyon converters and storage rings. Jonders reflected on how small that reactor was against the mountains, and how expensive it was in human resources; and he thought of those resources dedicated to the linking of this planet with an envoy of humanity far outside the solar system, and without being sure why, he was suddenly comfortable with his decision to aid Mozy—even if it cost him his job.

  But his methods—those he was not so sure of. Kadin would be the one to know. Kadin lived his entire life in a universe like Mozy's, and he knew the inner structure of that world far better than Jonders, better even than the designers under Fogelbee who had been the architects of the system. Perhaps he ought to talk with Kadin once more to clarify his plan.

  He was halfway around the southern wing of the building now, and he realized that he was shivering. Too many thoughts in his mind. He shook his head and strode back up the lawn and in the side door.

  Lusela Burns met him just outside the Personality Lab. "I've been looking all over for you. They told me down in the pit that you were planning to do another linkup in two hours," she said, turning into the lab with him.

  "Right," he said. "First I want to do a consultation with Kadin, though—and I'd appreciate no interruptions." He stopped and looked at Lusela. "Can you run interference for me?"

  "Bill, what's going on around here?" she asked. "What are you doing?"

  "Can't tell you right now."

  "What do you mean? How can I—"

  "I don't have time. I'll tell you later. Right now I have to ask Kadin something and talk to Mozy."

  Lusela held up her hands, halting him. "That's why I was trying to find you. Marshall called. He wants you in his office at thirteen-hundred."

  "What? Did he say what he wants?" That was just an hour from now.

  "No, only that Ken will be there, and you'll be teleconferencing with Hathorne."

  Jonders cursed under his breath. "I can't wait then—I'll have to do it now."

  "Do what?"

  He grabbed her by the arm. "I need your help. Call the communications room and tell them I'm on my way. I want a one-way link to the spacecraft, and I want it ready when I get there."

  "All right, but what are you—?"

  "Just do it, Lusela, just do it." He turned and hurried back down the corridor.

  * * *

  Rage burned in her like a cold fire, unextinguished by her efforts at analysis. Analysis was out. She was sunk far too deep in her rage now to pluck apart her feelings and look at the pieces. And yet it was an odd sensation, this rage, with none of the physical sensations one associated with anger, no rise in blood pressure, no adrenaline rush, no darkening of the vision. It was almost not an emotional thing at all, except that it was an irresistible force, channeling her thoughts down a course of its own making, scattering reason before it like debris before a floodtide.

  What hurt the most? Being deceived, then raped and discarded? Her own naivete, letting herself fall in love with this thing that was Kadin, and then all the more fool, going to Hoshi and begging him, pleading with him, and all the time Hoshi must have been laughing out loud behind her back at his cleverness, and her folly?

  And where was she now? Tricked, trapped . . . she had lost everything, everything, and for what? What was left? She might as well turn herself off and be done with it; there ought to be a way she could do that, ask Mother Program to do it for her, perhaps. It was not the most ignoble way to die, it would surely be worse to wait and have them do it for her . . . .

  . . .David, you got me into this, can't you get me out? David?

  Lord, you're still calling for him, don't you know what he is? A fake. A phony. A lousy damn computer program.

  Yes. And what am I?

  There was silence in her thoughts, then, silence filling the universe, filling the void that would be her world for the rest of her life.

  An attitude jet sputtered. There was no one within a quarter of a light year to hear it, or to care. The whispering static of the cosmic wind: that was all she was to have for company.

  Something opened; there was a hollowness, something about to penetrate the silence.

  It was Mother Program. (MESSAGE FROM . . .)

  (Jonders? Put him on.) She was ready to burn his ears, and this time she'd make sure she got the first word. And the last.

  (Open the channel,) she said.

  (OPEN.)

  (Jonders?) she said. There was no answer, nor could she see his face. There was no motion in the darkness, no sign of life. (Jonders, answer me,) she demanded. (Mother Program, is he here?)

  (WE ARE RECEIVING A SIGNAL.)

  (Jonders, dammit—)

  A light appeared in the dark, yellowish and murky, like a locomotive headlight coming head-on through a pea-soup fog. (Mozy,) said a familiar voice. It was Jonders, but he sounded distant, as though his thoughts, his voice were reaching her through that fog. (Mozy, I have to—)

  (Jonders, get out here where I can see you!) she said, practically shouting.

  (—about something, about your survival, so please—)

  This was incredible, couldn't he hear her? Why wouldn't he show his face? (Jonders, do you hear me? I'm not listening to a word until you come out and listen to me first!)

  (—carefully, and you must do exactly as I say.)

  It was just the light in the fog speaking to her, and it wasn't getting any closer, and she was becoming more furious by the moment. (Mother Program—why isn't he answering?)

  (IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HOMEBASE TO ANSWER, BECAUSE WE ARE NOT TRANSMITTING. WE ARE IN RECHARGE MODE. WE ARE RECEIVING A ONE-WAY TRANSMISSION FROM HOMEBASE.)

  Now that was just great. But why wouldn't he at least show his face? She knew the answer to that already. A face was an image generated in her own mind, her own perception, cobbled out of memory in response to the give-and-take of the link. There was no give-and-take now, none of the unconscious cues that evoked a visual image. It was only a voice. She could listen, or she could shut him off. God damn you, Jonders!

  Her fury was back in full force now, hot not cold, and she'd be damned if she was going to listen to him talk at her. />
  But what the hell does the bastard want, anyway?

  (—dare wait for full two-way transmission. Mozy, there's a good chance that an attempt will be made to terminate you—)

  What's that?

  (—to erase you—)

  Her fury turned to ice. Jesus Christ. He's calling to say they're killing me, and maybe I should put my affairs in order, is that it? Why don't the bastards just do it?

  (I don't know exactly when, and I don't know for sure if this will work. But I'm going to tell you how I think you might be able to shield yourself—)

  Mozy dizzily reached backward into the ship, clutching at the reality of her existence with a tendril of her consciousness, anchoring herself to the ship's sensors and power systems, and Mother Program. Whatever else she thought about Jonders and the others, there was one fact she knew, with a sudden and overwhelming certainty. Of all of the furies and passions and worries, only one mattered anymore. She wanted to keep on living.

  Jonders had not missed a beat. Her thoughts suddenly fell into focus as every word of his rang in her mind.

  Chapter 21

  Stanley Gerschak pointed just ahead, to where runoff from a recent rain had washed across the trail. "It's soft here," he cautioned.

  Payne took a leaping stride—and landed with one foot half in the mud on the opposite side of the puddle. With a mutter, he scraped his shoe clean against a clump of weeds, and hurried after Gerschak. He wished he knew why Gerschak had insisted upon taking him down the backwoods trail. The astronomer had been talking as they walked, telling him something about a rift in the scientific community. "What were you saying about the West Coast?" Payne asked, as he caught up again.

  Gerschak seemed not to hear. He pointed ahead. "There it is." Payne peered, trying to see what Gerschak was pointing to. Scattered bits of autumn color remained on the trees, but most of the foliage not evergreen was bare, and a metallic sky shone through the branches. The underbrush was thick with fallen leaves, and from somewhere came the scent of burning wood. Finally Payne spied a glint of water. He followed Gerschak down another path, and a few minutes later, the two stood beside a cluster of pine trees, at the edge of a pond.

  "It's lovely," Payne murmured. The pool was fed by a stream running in from the left, and it spilled quietly over a dam of branches and debris into a gully at the other end. The water was clear and rippling, disturbed by a small animal on the far side. Above the treetops, at the far left end of the pond, rose the radio antenna and telescope dome of the observatory.

  Gerschak bent to pick up a pine cone. As he straightened, he tossed it in his hand. "I like to come here for privacy," he said. "Sometimes the office is a hard place to talk, or think." He glanced at Payne. "Anyway—breakdown in communication. It's part of the general fragmentation process, I suppose—the Northeast from the West Coast, and both trying to catch up with the South, which has most of the money, and new talent." He gazed across the stream. "Actually, the ones to watch are the space-based groups, at least in astronomy."

  Payne watched him curiously. This seemed a different Stanley Gerschak from the brash, posturing fellow who had cornered him at the Theater of the Sea. When Payne had called him, Gerschak had sounded surprised, but had invited him to visit the Berkshires Observatory. He seemed a mercurial sort of fellow. Sober, and on his own turf, he was considerably less defensive and more self-confident, though obviously troubled about certain aspects of his work.

  "Legitimate research doesn't always get a fair hearing," Gerschak said. "The critical give and take has broken down. And sometimes you can't be sure where science leaves off and the military begins."

  "Are you talking about your own research?" Payne asked cautiously.

  Gerschak picked at the ridges of the pine cone with his fingernail. Suddenly he flung it out over the end of the pool. "Yeah. I guess so. Let's get on up to the station."

  They crossed the upstream end of the pool over a small wooden footbridge, and continued through the woods. "I'll let you judge the recordings for yourself," Gerschak said.

  Payne hurried to keep up, and to keep Gerschak talking. Until now, the astronomer had avoided the subject of his own work. "Donny Alvarest talked about the Father Sky space probe," Payne said. "It uses tachyons to link with Earth, doesn't it?"

  "It does," Gerschak said. "And we've detected their signals, on occasion. But the signals I've told you about are quite different. They're not from Father Sky."

  "What are they, then?"

  Gerschak led the way out of the trees. The observatory parking lot was in front of them now, the telescope dome to one side, and the radio-astronomy dish beyond, at the summit of the hill. "What they are," Gerschak said, "is a highly modulated beam of tachyons, apparently focused on near-Earth space."

  "From?"

  "The constellation Serpens."

  Payne was startled. "You mean—from another star?"

  Gerschak shook his head. "From the direction of Serpens, I mean. Something outside the solar system, apparently. Perhaps way outside. We really don't know."

  Payne considered the possibilities. "Would this have any connection with Father Sky?"

  Gerschak pursed his lips. His eyes were suddenly bright, almost feverish. "If it doesn't, I'd say it's one hell of a coincidence that Father Sky happens to be traveling out of the solar system—in the direction of the constellation Serpens." He led the way across the parking lot. They walked around the observatory offices and stood by the road that led toward the radio-telescope dish, silhouetted against the valley and the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. "That's part of our detection system," Gerschak said.

  Payne frowned. "I thought it took some elaborate setup in vacuum to detect tachyons." In truth, until he had skimmed the library references on the orbiting Tachylab, he had known almost nothing about tachyon communications.

  "We've found a poor-man's way," Gerschak answered. He inclined his head toward the radio dish. "A modification to that helps us localize the source of the signal. The actual receiver is in the high-energy physics building, down in the valley. The measurements from the two are correlated here at the observatory."

  "How do you trap something that moves faster than light?"

  "Well—" Gerschak scratched his chin. "We don't actually capture the tachyon particles, as they do at Tachylab. What we do is observe their passage by measuring their influence on the weak interaction in the nuclei of certain superheavy isotopes. As I say, Tachylab's methods are more sensitive, but ours work."

  Payne squinted, trying to reconcile this with his own limited knowledge of Revised Relativity. In the course of his research, he had managed to digest a few facts about the mysterious particles. No one theory provided a full explanation. Some referred to quarks as consisting of bound, closed-loop tachyons. Other explanations made even less sense to him. "How does one produce a tachyon?" he asked.

  "Mmm—" Gerschak gestured toward the office building, and started walking. "You know that Relativity forbids the acceleration of particles from sublight speed to lightspeed, and it forbids the slowing of faster-than-light particles to lightspeed. Right?"

  Payne nodded.

  "So the trick is to produce particles that are superluminal at the moment of their creation. It's done with high-energy rings, and certain kinds of collisions of subatomic particles. You could make a rough analogy to quantum tunneling in electronic applications. A particle with a certain energy level—say, an electron—may cross a high-energy barrier to a lower-energy region, without ever acquiring the energy it would seem to need to cross the barrier."

  He glanced at Payne. "The technique is different, but you could think of lightspeed as being a similar kind of barrier. No particle can ever be given enough energy to cross lightspeed, because the mass of an object approaches infinity as its velocity approaches lightspeed, and so the energy required would be infinite. But with certain tricks you can induce a particle to appear on the high side of lightspeed, without ever crossing it. Then, if
you trap it in a storage ring, you can accelerate it to even higher speeds, and at the same time get energy back from it. The greater a tachyon's velocity beyond lightspeed, the lower its energy. At infinite speed, a tachyon has no energy at all. These, however, are finite tachyons."

  "And that's what they do at Tachylab—and on the spacecraft?" Payne asked.

  "Essentially. The rings on Father Sky are much smaller, much less powerful." Gerschak swung open the door. They walked down an empty hall, lined with bulletin boards, charts, and astronomical photographs. Two graduate students came out of a door, carrying computer printouts. Gerschak nodded to them, but did not speak. He stopped and unlocked a door, then hesitated. "I should tell you—about this recording—half the people here think I'm crazy." He turned the knob. "You can decide for yourself."