"Fine. Give me two minutes."
Cadwell got up and walked through to the outer office. Mitzi was away on some errand. He carried on through to the corridor and along to the room where the neurocouplers were installed. He had thoughts on and off of putting one in his office but hadn't made his mind up yet. Gimmicks to impress visitors wasn't his style, and it would have better use out where it was, available for anyone. He lay back with the feeling it always gave him of being at the dentist's. Moments later he was standing in a brightly decorated room of marble walls, rich furnishings, floor coverings, and draperies, with a window looking out at towers and soaring arches. Calazar was sitting on a couch before a low table with several other seats positioned around it.
"Your timing was excellent. I was just catching up on some reading." The alien stood and gestured at one of the seats. "Join me, please."
No, he was supposed to stop thinking "alien," Caldwell reminded himself. That was what this whole visit was about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
VISAR had abandoned its attempts to solve the convergence problem by generating a "quantum signature" unique to a particular universe, by means of which other universes could effectively be locked out. Although the concept was sound enough, it turned out that the amount of information needed to define a stable zone increased exponentially with the size of the zone. This meant that beyond trivial experiments that had little value other than to demonstrate the principle, the amount of calculation necessary to achieve a realistic operating volume capable of supporting anything worthwhile rose rapidly toward infinity, taxing the capacity of even something like VISAR. The Thurien mathematicians held hopes they might find some form of short-cut or algorithm that would render the problem tractable, but they were the first to admit that as of now they had no clear idea of what they were looking for, and the search for a solution, if one existed at all, could well take years.
The breakthrough came from a completely unexpected direction that didn't involve mathematicians or advanced theoreticians at all, but space propulsion engineers. Thurien spacecraft operated by an advanced form of the drive employed in the Shapieron, going back to the early days of Ganymean Minerva, whereby the ship was carried inside a propagating "bubble" of distorted spacetime. Whereas modern Thurien vessels drew their power from the interstellar grid beamed through h-space, the Shapieron used its own onboard generators. Some of Eesyan's group had been looking into the separate problem of maintaining coherence of the standing wave that defined an object projected out across the Multiverse, hence halting it. The method worked, but it was unstable. After a brief existence ranging so far from fractions of a second to a minute or so, the wave would break up-not observed directly, but inferred from observations of objects arriving from other universes that had done so in this one.
Eesyan's scientists had approached the space-drive designers to find out more about how this bubble was created, their thought being that something like it might be contrived to contain the standing wave pattern in such a way that would prevent it from dispersing. It seemed, when they looked into it, that adapting the technique to M-space should be fairly straightforward-it involved a longitudinal form of the same type of wave that the engineers had long experience of dealing with. But when preliminary experiments were run at Quelsang to investigate the creation of M-space bubbles, a completely unexpected result was observed.
An M-space bubble apparently kept time-line convergences contained, restricting them to the inside. Even when Eesyan gave approval for the machine's power to be cautiously increased to a level where convergences had occurred outside the transfer chamber before, nothing was detected. Tests showed that the effect was still there, but confined inside the bubble sitting in the center of the chamber. Outside, the chaos of events and objects with different past histories all being present at the same time and place was eliminated. Nobody was quite sure how this came about, which would no doubt provide the theoreticians with another area of contention that that might keep them occupied for years. But it wasn't the first time, either for Thuriens or for Terrrans, that a practical solution to a problem had preceded the appearance of an elegant theory explaining why it worked.
So the convergence problem was apparently solved-or at least, acceptably contained. When the bubble was combined with the transfer wave function as part of the pattern projected across the Multiverse, it turned out that it did indeed achieve the original aim of confining dispersion as well. So an object sent into another universe could now be induced to remain there.
Creating a bubble required a considerable input of energy. Suitable sources couldn't be carried in the tiny test objects used in the Quelsang experiments, or even the probes being projected from MP2, which were still little more than compact signaling beacons. The method developed, therefore, was to stretch the bubble created at the projector to suppress time line convergence into an elongated filament that the projected wave function expanded at the far end to enclose the test object as well. The bubble thus took an extended dumbbell form of two contained zones connected by a filament that carried the energy to sustain the surface at the far end. When bubble experiments were performed on the transmitters being projected from MP2, it was found that the filament also acted as a conduit for the signal sent back, which if intercepted outside the trapped convergence zone, could be decoded coherently. The filaments were dubbed "umbilicals."
The nice thing about it all was that once the object had consolidated and stabilized, the energy previously fed through to maintain the pattern was no longer required, and the bubble could be switched off. It "really" existed there, in the other universe, and although there was no way of testing it yet, theory indicated that it should thereafter be capable of interacting independently with its surroundings and moving around in them freely.
Although an exemplary achievement, all this was still akin to firing an artillery shell blind and knowing it had landed somewhere. To say where would require knowing something about the surroundings and circumstances that it had landed in. But at least the scientists were now in a position to decode intelligibly any information that was sent back. The next step would be to project objects large enough and complex enough to send back more than just an identification code.
It was something like a reversed form of deja vu. There was the eerie feeling of having been through this before, but this time Hunt was on the other side of it.
He sat in the tower block lab, surrounded by exotically styled equipment, getting used again to the experience that he realized had become unfamiliar, of looking at a hard screen that was really there in front of him. The Thuriens hardly ever used them. What was the point in constructing hardware when the same effect could be generated more easily and with more versatility inside the viewer's head? But for these tests the Thurien scientists had wanted to be sure of capturing exactly what was seen and heard at the far end of the connection.
A half dozen or so of them sat or stood around the room, waiting and watching curiously. The Terrans were there too, with the exceptions of Danchekker, who was meeting with some Thurien philosophers to discuss his theory of consciousness, which he was still developing, and Mildred, away on one of her excursions into the city. The terminal was linked to the MP2 facility, several hundred thousand miles away, which was now fitted with its own internal bubble generator to contain convergence effects. With convergence suppressed, a small staff of researchers and technicians had been installed at MP2 to prepare the various configurations of instruments being despatched. However, the data transmissions back from the instruments were usually relayed to Thurien for monitoring and analysis.