For instance: What corroboration was there for Tun‡ Blumenthal's story? Was he the victim of an accident-or a battle? Had it happened in 2210-or later, perhaps from within the Singularity itself?
It turned out there was physical evidence: Blumenthal's spacecraft. It was a small vehicle (Tun‡ called it a repair boat), massing just over three tonnes. The bow end was missing-not cut by the smooth curve of a bobble, but flash-evaporated. That hull had a million times the opacity of lead; some monstrous burst of gamma had vaporized a good hunk of it just as the boat bobbled out.
The boat's drive was "ordinary" antigravity-but in this case, it was a built-in characteristic of the hull material. The comm and life-support systems bore familiar trademarks; their mechanism was virtually unintelligible. The recycler was thirty centimeters across; there were no moving parts. It appeared to be as efficient as a planetary ecology.
Tun could explain most of this in general terms. But the detailed explanations-the theory and the specs-had been in e he boat's database. And that had been in Tun‡'s jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', and Yel‚n had played with them quite a bit.
At one extreme was the lattice of monoprocessors and bobblers embedded in the hull. The monos were no smarter than a twentieth-century home computer, but each was less than one angstrom unit across. Each ran a simple program loop, IE17 times a second. That program watched its processor's brothers for signs of catastrophe-and triggered an attached bobbler accordingly. Yel‚n's fighter fleet had nothing like it.
At the other extreme was the computer in Tun‡'s headband. I t was massively parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yel‚n's time. Marta thought that, even without its database, Tun's headband made him as important to the plan as any of the other high-techs. They had given him a good part of their advanced equipment in exchange for its use.
Brierson smiled as he read the report. There were occasional comments by Marta, but Yel‚n was the engineer and this was mainly her work. Where he could follow it at all, the tone was a mix of awe and frustration. It read as he imagined Benjamin Franklin's analysis of a jet aircraft might read. Yel‚n could study the equipment, but without Tun's explanations its purpose would have been a mystery. And even knowing the purpose and the underlying principles of operation, she couldn't see how such devices could be built or why they worked so perfectly.
Wil's grin faded. Almost two centuries separated Ben Franklin from jet planes. Less than a decade stood between Yel‚n's expertise and this "repair boat." Wil knew about the acceleration of progress. It had been a fact of his life. But even in his time, there had been limits on how fast the marketplace could absorb new developments. Even if all these inventions could be made in just nine years-what about the installed base of older equipment? What about compatibility with devices not yet upgraded? How could the world of real products be turned inside out in such a short time?
Wil looked away from the display. So there was physical evidence, but it didn't prove much except that Tun‡ had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tun‡-rescued from the sun with inexplicable equipment and a story no one could check-of being another alien. Perhaps Juan's paranoia was not as all-encompassing as it seemed.
He really should have another chat with Blumenthal.
Wil used a comm channel that Yel‚n said was private. Blumenthal was as calm and reasonable as before. "Sure, I can talk. The work I do for Yel‚n is mainly programming; very flexible hours."
"Thanks. I wanted to talk more about how you got bobbled. You said it was possible you were shanghaied...."
Blumenthal shrugged. "It is possible. Yet most likely an accident it was. You've read about my company's project?"
"Just Yel‚n's summaries."
Tun hesitated, swapped out. "Ah, yes. What she says is fair. We were running a matter/antimatter distillery. But look at the numbers. Yel‚n's stations can distill perhaps a kilo per day -enough to power a small business. We were in a different class entirely. My partners and I specialized in close solar work, less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern hemisphere. When I... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to damage an unprotected solar system."
"Yel‚n's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of Yel‚n's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible without a headband.
"True!" Tun‡'s face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but they couldn't buy the necessary options. Then we came along with a much bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a small Tipler cylinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and have tidal strains above 1 E 13 g's per meter-but with bobbles it might be usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and siphon back the power to widen it."
Tun‡ paused, some of his enthusiasm gone. "That was the plan, anyway. In fact, the distillery was almost too much for us. We were on site for days at a time. It gets on your nerves after a while, knowing that beyond all the shielding, the sun is stretched from horizon to horizon. But we had to stay; we couldn't tolerate transmission delays. It took all of us linked to our mainframe to keep the brew stable.
"We had stability, but we weren't shipping quite everything out. Something near a tonne per second began accumulating over the south pole. We needed a quick fix or we'd lose performance bonuses. I took the repair boat across to work on it. The problem was just ten thousand kilometers from our station -a thirty-millisecond time lag. Intellect nets run fine with that much lag, but this was process control; we were taking a chance. We'd accumulated a two-hundred-thousand-tonne backlog by then. It was all in flicker storage-a slowly exploding bomb. I had to repackage it and boost it out."
Tun‡ shrugged. "That's the last I remember. Somehow, we lost control; part of that backlog recombined. My boat bobbled up. Now, I was on the sun side of the brew. The blast rammed me straight into Sol. There was no way my partners could save me.
Bobbled into the sun. It was almost high-tech slang for certain death. "How could you ever escape?"
Blumenthal smiled. "You haven't read about that? There is no way in heaven I could have. On the sun, the only way you can survive is to stay in stasis. My initial bobbling was only for a few seconds. When it lapsed, the fail-safe did a quick lookabout, saw where we were heading, and rebobbled-sixty-four thousand years. That was `effective infinity' to its pinhead program.
"I've done some simulations since. I hit the surface fast enough to penetrate thousands of kilometers. The bobble spent a few years following convection currents around inside. It wasn't as dense as the inner sunstuff. Eventually I percolated back to near the surface. Then, every time the bobble floated over a blow-off, it was boosted tens of thousands of kilometers up.... For thirty thousand years a damn volleyball I was, flying up to the corona, falling back through the photosphere, floating around awhile, then getting thrown up again.