***
It was their project, the Thuriens pointed out; the privilege of sending the first being should be theirs. The Terrans reminded them that it was they who had been contacted by the relay bringing the message that had put them all on the right track, so they should have the first shot. Nobody was quite certain of the logic by which this conclusion followed, but it was the best argument that anyone on the Terran team could come up with, so they all pretended not to be aware of the non sequitur. Wrangling continued until the matter got back to Caldwell, whose reply was simply, "Why not send one of each?" Why not? Like so many obvious things, it was obvious once somebody had said it.
Then, of course, the question became, Who, from each? Since Hunt was officially the leader of the Terran group, there was no question in his mind that it meant him-there was an old principle about officers not expecting the men to do anything they weren't prepared to do themselves, and in any case it suited his temperament. Duncan Watt disputed this on the grounds that Hunt's experience made him less expendable, which Hunt read as a cheap ploy by Duncan to get himself some glory. The Thuriens were at a bit of a loss to follow these intricacies, since the concept of personal glory meant little to them anyway. Danchekker contacted Caldwell privately to confide the view Duncan was right in maintaining that Vic shouldn't be put at risk, small though the risk might be, and suggested it might be appropriate for Caldwell to pull rank and take the decision out of Hunt's hands. Caldwell, however, knew that seeing the leader overruled wouldn't be good for the group and elected not to interfere, leaving it to Hunt to assert his position by pulling rank instead-as Caldwell knew he would. That much having been settled, the Thuriens took a dissent-free view that if the Terrans were putting forward the head of their group, the Thuriens would do likewise. So Hunt and Eesyan, it turned out to be.
***
They had to travel out to MP2 for the test, and wear space suits. The original transfer chamber at Quelsang wasn't big enough to take a single human, let alone an eight-foot Thurien as well. The reason MP2 had been built remotely in space and projected its test objects into distant regions was to avoid the hazards associated with things rematerializing inside solid matter. The same considerations applied when it came to projecting people-if anything, more so. Hence the suits.
They stood gripping a handrail on a raised grating in the metal-walled chamber. A clutter of monitoring heads and instrument mountings filled the space around them, packed between the apertures of the projector barrels angling in from all directions. In several places, eyes looked in on them through observation ports. Below the grating was the five-foot diameter sphere containing the convergence suppressor. No doubt the strange things that happened with time would become a subject for further research one day, but for present purposes they would remain confined in there. As a test object, Hunt and Eesyan were well below the size where carrying a local bubble generator became necessary.
Although Hunt had maintained a light-hearted attitude all the way through to now, this all had a sinister and oppressive feeling. He felt like the victim in some macabre, over-elaborate execution ritual. His usual inclination toward banter had deserted him. The suit readings were all good, projector systems counting down; there was nothing much to be said. Although Caldwell was patched in from Earth again, he was being reticent this time. It was as if he could read Hunt's mood. Typical Gregg, Hunt thought to himself.
"Everything okay?" the Thurien supervising scientist's voice inquired inside Hunt's helmet.
"All okay."
"As ready as we'll be," Eesyan said.
The black mouths of the projectors flickered yellow for an instant, then stabilized to a uniform, depthless indigo. "Sequencing out… Transferring."
And Hunt was floating in space. This was not some virtual illusion manufactured by VISAR, that he was experiencing in a neural coupler somewhere. He was really out here-several thousand miles from MP2, if all had gone as scheduled. It seemed to have-Hunt could see one of the beacons at a distance he judged to be a mile or less away. With live beings involved in the test, Eesyan had stipulated sending a backup beacon ahead in addition to the regular homing beacon. As Hunt gyrated slowly, Eesyan came into view, sliding by with the starfield. His long Ganymean face was turning this way and that inside the headpiece of the Thurien space suit as he took in the surroundings. Hunt could feel his gloominess of only a few moments ago giving way to a strangely exhilarating sense of awe.
He had to remind himself of what had just happened. Every one of the particles that composed his body had been converted to a component of a wave pattern projected and stabilized a short way across the Multiverse. There, drawing on energy beamed through by the projectors, the wave components had condensed into the nodes that define material particles, reconstituting the configuration that equated to Victor Hunt.
This was him now, a structure frozen out of vibrating local energy condensations, just as the one back at MP2 had been. A containment bubble sustained through the M-space umbilical from the projectors was keeping the pattern together while it found a local energy balance and stabilized.
"How are we reading?" the supervisor's voice checked.
"Everything appears to be admirable," Eesyan replied.
"Vic?"
"Oh… fine. Just fine."
"It's looking good from here. Are we clear to go to the next phase?" There would have been nothing to be gained by not completing the process once they had gotten this far. Eesyan looked across. Hunt gave a double thumbs-up with his gauntlets and nodded.
"Proceed," Eesyan said.
"Dissolving bubble now."
They allowed several seconds to elapse. The indicators on Hunt's sleeve panel that monitored the status of the link channel changed to null readings suddenly. "This is Eesyan, calling Control. Testing." There was no response. Hunt tried and got the same result.
"I guess we're on our own," Hunt said over the local channel.
"Sobering to contemplate, indeed."
For the MP2 that Hunt could make out as a point of light gleaming in the direction opposite to Gistar was not the MP2 they had come from. He was staring out through his helmet visor at a different universe. And he and Eesyan were now part of it. There could be another Hunt inside this MP2 there, right now; and if not, there would almost certainly be one somewhere on the Thurien behind his right shoulder, looking the size of a dime. The beacon that had appeared over ten minutes ago now was probably causing consternation already. Hunt grinned to himself as he pictured the reactions if the Thurien senors had resolved in addition two space-suited figures floating miles from anywhere in space.
The sleeve panel indicators registered activity again. VISAR having remained locked on to the beacon throughout, had reformed the bubble. "Control checking. Your readings look good."
"All fine," Eesyan reported.
"Fine," Hunt echoed.
"I suppose you realize you've just made history?" Caldwell's voice came in, judging with perfection that Hunt was in a sociable mood again.
"It seems to be becoming a daily thing here these days, Gregg," Hunt told him.
"Seen enough?" the supervisor at MP2 inquired.
"One could never see enough of this," Eesyan replied.
"Well, it will have to do," the other Thurien quipped. "It's all we have scheduled, and there's this very meticulous boss I have to deal with. Sorry, people, but it's time to bring you home."
***
After that, there were trials that involved sending the Shapieron with occupants to a succession of targets progressively "farther" away in the Multiverse. There were no new surprises. At last the time came to put final touches to the planning for the mission that it had all been leading up to, which had been proceeding at its own pace in parallel with the engineering. Eesyan and Hunt had a final meeting with Calazar, Showm, and a deputation from the Assembly that was reporting on the project. There seemed no reason why everything shouldn't be ready for a departure in two weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Imares Broghuilio experienced the feeling close to panic that comes with being aware of having regained consciousness, but of nothing else. He didn't know where he was, or what had preceded the present instant. He just… "was." Peculiar patterns of light seemed to shrink and grow and whirl in his head. It was if his mind had somehow disintegrated into a billion fragments and was now only beginning to form itself together again. He was lying on a hard, uncomfortable surface and felt stiff and cold, as if he had been there for some time. The only sounds were the muted hum of machinery and a steady whoosh of air blowing from a ventilator.
He opened his eyes. For an indeterminate time that could have been anything from a few seconds to a matter of minutes, the farrago of objects, shapes, patches of color, and centers of light that he found himself looking at refused to take on a coherence that conveyed meaning. The side of his head hurt, as if he had struck it. Then a flat, synthetic, voice from somewhere intoned, "Unstable resonance condition abating. Reintegrating to normal space after unscheduled h-transfer. Arrival coordinates unknown. Locator call not being acknowledged. No grid activity detected. Evaluating."
The words cued the pieces of visual imagery to assemble themselves together to become the interior of the bridge deck of a Jevlenese spacecraft. A groan from nearby completed the process of nudging Boghuilio's mental faculties back into motion. Crisis… Local JEVEX nodes down… Thuriens and Terrans have thwarted the plan… Get away and regroup… Emergency transfer to Uttan.
It was coming back to him now. Five Jevlenese ships carrying Broguilio, recently proclaimed premier of what had turned out to be the short-lived Federation of Jevlenese Worlds, his immediate circle of accomplices, and a hard core of followers, had taken off from Jevlen in a bid to escape to their secret fortress-factory planet, Uttan, where they would be able to hold out while they reconsolidated and made new plans. But the Shapierion, which by rights shouldn't have been anywhere near Jevlen, had appeared out of nowhere, bearing down in pursuit. After the underhanded dealings that had evidently been going on for some time between Calazar and the Earth, the Shapieron could have been carrying Terrans with Terran weaponry. The Jevlenese ships would never outrun an old Ganymean, self-powered starship in normal space. Broghuilio had ordered immediate h-space transfer to Uttan.
Uttan was where the real JEVEX system had been secretly relocated. The activity supported at Jevlen, which was all the Thuriens had known about for years, was a shell operation. But when JEVEX attempted to project a spinning black-hole transfer port for the five ships, some other force attempting to counter it had intervened, causing the vortex to go unstable and creating conditions of violently tangled and convulsing spacetime. It could only have been VISAR, trying from light-years away to block the transfer, but with nothing to guide it apart from inadequate information from one of the Shapieron's reconnaissance probes dogging the Jevlenese's heels. Attempts at evasion came too late. Impelled on an irreversible gravity gradient, the five Jevlenese ships had plunged on, into the turmoil of scrambled Relativity.
The groan came again. Broghuilio mustered his energies, winced as his head lifted from the deck plates, and hauled himself up sufficiently to turn and sit with his back against the base of a console. Wylott, the former Jevlenese Secretary of the Exterior, since appointed Commanding General of new Federation's military forces, was hunched over in one of the operator-station seats, holding his face in his hands. A trickle of blood had run down from between his fingers onto his sleeve. Broguilio brought a hand up to feel his own face and his beard. He found nothing wet or sticky. Garwain Estordu, the scientific advisor who had been with them, was lying along an aisle between cabinets and equipment panels, still unconscious. Around them, the captain and other members of the crew who had been in the vicinity were either motionless in assorted crumpled and splayed positions, or slowly beginning to move and show signs of life. "Full evaluation not possible at this time," the computer that had spoken before reported. "Matrix and system files have been disrupted. Necessary to run deep-scan diagnostics, repair linkages, and reconstruct. Acknowledgment requested… Repeat, acknowledgment requested… Proceeding."
Broghuilio registered the situation dully. His eyes drifted upward to take in the main display screen overlooking the bridge deck. It was showing a view of space and stars. So at least that much was still working… To one side of center was the disk of a planet. It was not Jevlen. Nor was it Uttan. It wasn't a world that Broghuilio recalled seeing before at all.
***
There was no doubt about it. The planet was Minerva, accompanied by its moon. The spectrum, size, and mass of the parent star, something like three hundred million miles away, were identical to that of Sol, and then a telescopic survey of the surroundings had picked out Jupiter. The star pattern was as projected from that point in space-except that it had to be corrected to allow for the passage of fifty thousand years. There was no signal of any kind to indicate any presence of the Thurien h-grid, and nothing on any of their communications, navigation, or data bands. Nor should there be. There was no Thurien presence in this part of the Galaxy. VISAR, as such, didn't yet exist. The Jevlenese ships were back at Minerva, before the time of its destruction.
Even Broghuilio was too numbed by the realization slowly seeping into his brain to show much of his customary bellicosity. "How is this possible?" he whispered to Estordu, now recovered sufficiently to sit in one of the crew stations, but still shaky.
The scientist ran his gaze over the displays for the umpteenth time as if a part of his mind still retained a hope that their message might have changed somehow. "What we entered was a total dislocation of spacetime. It has jumped us to another region of the quantum totality. I can't tell you how. Nothing in physics has ever predicted anything like it."
"So how do we get back?" Broghuilio demanded.
Estordu shook his head bleakly. "The energy concentration that it took could only be created by systems with the capacity of VISAR and JEVEX focusing through the h-grid. There is nothing like that here. We have no way of getting back." Broghuilio's face colored and began to swell. "You can shout as much as you want, Excellency, but it won't change anything," Estordu said. "What we should be thinking about are the options we have here. There is no other choice."
Such talk from the normally obsequious Estordu was so out of character and unexpected that Broghuilio stopped as he was about to speak, deflated, and for a moment just stared. Maybe Estordu was still more traumatized than he showed. The Captain and other officers within hearing, and other members of Broguilio's staff who had appeared, digested the information somberly.
Wylott had a mild gash on one cheek but nothing worse apart from a bruise or two. "So we are without primary h-grid power?" he concluded. "Just the auxiliary system?"
"So it appears, General," the captain said.
"We will need to put down somewhere soon," Wylott observed.
A barb congratulating Wylott on his brilliance began forming reflexively on Broghuilio's lips, but then died. Sarcasm would get them nowhere. "Captain, convey the situation to the commanders of the other vessels," he ordered. "Have them stand by for further instructions."
"Aye, aye, Excellency."
Broghuilio paced across the floor to stand staring up at the main display, still showing the view of Minerva, while he thought. He still needed to keep a hand on one of the consoles to steady himself, he found. He wished now that he had made the effort to learn as much as was known about precataclysm Minerva when the opportunity had been there. But he had concentrated on the Earth surveillance program, managing the information reported to the Thuriens, and secretly building up the Jevlenese military capability. His face was turned toward the future, he had been fond of telling his subordinates. What was past was past and didn't concern him. The words had an ironic ring to them now.
He had talked about Earth as the new power base of the Cerians, but that was more for the propaganda value. He really didn't know that much about the
Cerians, other than that they were one of the two superpowers whose eventual catastrophic war had destroyed Minerva. The Thuriens had taken the survivors of the other side, Lambia, back to their own part of the Galaxy, eventually installing them on Jevlen. That made the Jevlenese "Lambians"; it followed that the Cerians were the enemy. Broghuilio's historical analysis and any ideology stemming from it had never really gone a lot deeper than that. He looked at the moon, half lit behind Minerva's disk.
"JEVEX." The prompt was a mental reflex. There was no response. Of course, JEVEX wasn't there. He turned his head to speak over his shoulder. "Advisor Estordu. What can you tell me about the Lunarians' technical capabilities at this time? Military organization and weapons capability in particular."
"The most we have to go on is the events of the final war-which obviously hasn't happened yet. But even by that time, the phase they were at was still primitive-rudimentary nuclear and beam weapons; off-planet capability just sufficient to contest near space and establish long-range bombardment installations on their moon, and some robot surveys sent to Earth. But indication are that most of the advances necessary to produce even that occurred toward the end, as militarization on both sides accelerated."
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