And now, it was time.
Adikor stood at his control console on one side of the room, and Ponter stood at his on the other. Dern had a separate console, perched on a tabletop.
“Got everything you need for the trip?” asked Adikor.
Ponter did a final check. Hak, of course, was always there—and had been upgraded with a full medical/surgical database, in case anything happened to Ponter or Tukana in the Gliksin world.
A wide leather band covered with pouches encircled Ponter’s waist. He’d already done the inventory: antibiotics, antivirals, immune-system boosters, sterilized bandages, acauterizing laser scalpel, surgical scissors, and a selection of drugs including decongestants, analgesics, and soporifics. Tukana wore a similar belt. They also both had suitcases containing several changes of clothes. “All set,” said Ponter, and “All set,” repeated Tukana.
Adikor looked at Dern. “What about you?”
The fat man nodded. “Ready.”
“Whenever you want to proceed, then,” said Adikor to Ponter.
Ponter gave Adikor a splayed-fingers gesture. “Let’s find our cousins.”
“All right,” said Adikor. “Ten!”
One Exhibitionist was standing next to Adikor; the other, next to Ponter.
“Nine!”
The three members of the High Gray Council looked at each other; more had wanted to attend, but it was decided that three was the maximum that could be risked.
“Eight!”
Dern pulled out some control buds on his console.
“Seven!”
Ponter looked over at Ambassador Prat; if she was the least bit nervous, she was hiding it well.
“Six!”
He then looked over his shoulder at Adikor’s broad back. They had deliberately not said any elaborate goodbyes last night; neither wanted to admit that if something went wrong, there was a chance that Ponter would never come home again.
“Five!”
And it wasn’t just Adikor he stood to lose. The thought of his children ending up with no parents so early in life had been Ponter’s biggest worry about repeating his journey.
“Four!”
A lesser—but still significant—worry was that Ponter would fall ill again in the Gliksin world, although doctors here had boosted his immune system, and Hak had been modified to constantly monitor his blood for foreign bodies.
“Three!”
There was also concern that either Ponter or Tukana might develop allergies to things on the other side.
“Two!”
And Ponter had some misgivings about the long-term stability of the gateway, which was, after all, based on quantum processes that were by their very nature inherently unpredictable. Still…
“One!”
Still, with all the potential problems, with all the potential negatives, there was one very positive aspect about returning to the Gliksin world…
“Zero!”
Ponter and Adikor simultaneously pulled buds on their control panels.
Suddenly, a great roar came from the computing chamber, which was visible through a window in the control room. Ponter knew what was happening, although he’d never been a spectator to it before. Everything that wasn’t bolted down in the computing chamber was being shunted to the other universe. The glass-and-steel register cylinders—even the wonky one, number 69—stayed put, but all the air in the chamber was being swapped for a comparable mass in the other universe. When Ponter had been accidentally transferred over, the corresponding space on the other side had contained a giant acrylic sphere full of heavy water—the heart of a Gliksin neutrino detector.
But this time, no heavy water came gushing through. The chamber had been drained before Ponter had returned, so that the damage his arrival had done to the acrylic sphere could be repaired.
Right on cue, the gaudy probe—cylindrical, about an armspan long—tumbled through the blue fire that marked the portal, the light hugging the probe’s contours in profile as it did so. All that was visible now were the anchoring and telecommunications cables attached to the probe, pulled taut, disappearing into midair at about waist height. Ponter swung his attention to the large, wall-mounted monitor that had been added to the control room to display what the probe was seeing.
And what it was seeing was—
“Gliksins!” exclaimed Ambassador Prat.
“I’d only half believed it,” said Councilor Bedros.
Adikor turned to look at Ponter, grinning. “Anyone you know?”
Ponter squinted at the scene. As before, the portal had appeared several body-heights above ground; the quantum-computing facility seemed to be slightly higher up and slightly to the north of the center of the neutrino-detector chamber. A dozen or more Gliksins were working inside the still-dry chamber. They were all clad in coveralls, and they all had those yellow plastic turtle shells on their heads. Most of the Gliksins had the same pale skin that Ponter’s people had, but two had dark brown skin. Ponter got the impression that almost all the workers were males, but it was so hard to tell with Gliksins. Of course, the one face he’d hoped to see was female, but there was no reason she should be doing repair work down at the bottom of a mineshaft.
All the faces were looking directly at the probe, and several of the individuals were pointing with their scrawny arms.
“No,” said Ponter. “Nobody I know.”
The probe’s microphones were picking up sounds, all echoing weirdly in the cavernous chamber. Ponter couldn’t understand much of what was being said, but he did pick out his own name at one point. “Hak,” said Ponter, speaking to his Companion, “what are they saying?”
Hak had a new voice now; while getting upgrade work done on his Companion, Ponter had had Kobast Gant program in a pleasant male voice that wasn’t based on anyone Ponter knew.
Hak spoke through his external speaker, so that the entire assembled group could hear. “The male at the right side of the screen just invoked that thing they call God—apparently in this context, it’s an exclamation of surprise. The male next to him referred to the putative son of the God thing. And the woman next to him said, ‘Wholly feces.’”
“Very strange,” said Tukana.
“The male at the right,” continued Hak, “has now yelled for somebody out of our view to get Doctor Mah on the telecommunications link.”
As Hak spoke, several of the humans came close to the probe. Ponter enjoyed hearing the gasps from the three High Gray Council members and Ambassador Prat as they got their first close-up views of the strange, pinched Gliksin faces, with their preposterously small noses.
“Well,” said Dern, the roboticist, “it looks like we’ve reestablished contact, and it seems conditions on the other side are suitable.”
The three High Gray Council members conferred for a few beats, then Bedros nodded. “Let’s do it,” he said.
Ponter and Dern each took an end of the unexpanded Derkers tube. Adikor opened the door leading out to the computing floor. There was no equalizing hiss, no popping of ears; although the air in the computing chamber now presumably was mostly from the Gliksin world, comparable volumes had been exchanged. The Gliksins carefully filtered the air in the neutrino-detector facility, and the air Ponter was breathing now had no smell at all.
The point of entry to the other universe was clearly marked by the two cables disappearing into a blue-limned hole in space. Dern, who had been on hand when Ponter was recovered the first time, maneuvered the tip of the collapsed Derkers tube so that it was in contact with the probe’s anchor cable. Ponter swung the length of the tube—a good eight armspans—and lined it up parallel to the anchor cable.
“Ready?” asked Dern, looking over his shoulder at Ponter.
Ponter nodded. “Ready.”
“All right,” said Dern. “Gently now.”
Dern began feeding the collapsed tube through the portal, which widened just enough to accommodate its narrow diameter. Ponter pushed gently from the rear. Adikor had brought a portable monitor with him, which was repeating the view from the probe. He angled the device so that Dern and Ponter could see what was happening on the other side. Although the probe had been lowered to the bottom of the neutrino detector chamber, so that the two cables attached to it took a downward turn as soon as they went through the portal, the Derkers tube was protruding parallel to the floor far below. The Gliksins couldn’t reach it; it was too far above their heads. But they were pointing at it, and shouting among themselves.