VISAR reported, "The probe platform is stabilizing." On the screen, an image formed of stars in a black background of space. Murmurs came from around the room. Some of the occupants moved closer behind Hunt, although the screen content was being copied neurally via avco. The view slid by as instruments on the probe scanned their surroundings. Earth appeared from an upper corner, showing the Atlantic hemisphere, and moved toward the center, bringing the Moon into view as a three-quarter crescent on one side.
"Right on!" a Thurien voice approved somewhere nearby.
"It makes me feel quite homesick," Sonnebrandt said to nobody in particular.
VISAR announced, hardly necessarily, "Target location is confirmed. It's where we wanted it to be. Starfield distribution and positions of visible planets are consistent with specified time frame.
"Unbelievable!" Chien whispered.
VISAR again: "And we're picking up communications. Processing for system codes and message protocols. This may take a few seconds."
Duncan: "I'd thought we were still months away from anything like this."
Sandy: "These guys are good."
A Thurien: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
Another Thurien: "What does that mean?"
"An Earth saying that my children picked up. Like it?"
VISAR's previous efforts to construct quantum signatures had turned out to be not entirely fruitless. Although failing to achieve the original purpose, the logic of groups and sets that they were based on provided the basis for a method of "mapping" the Multiverse by space and time coordinates, and introducing a measure of "affinity" that could be derived from a virtually an unlimited number of dimensions and grew less as universes became progressively more "different." Exactly in what kind of way they were different, and how rapidly that varied, could only be determined by sending things to various places, trying to make sense of what they found there, and calibrating the results to some kind of scale. The task was probably in a similar league to that of a medieval cartographer of village streets and farms setting out to map the world, and would probably take years to develop into a working, quantitative science, if not generations. But, as with Shakespeare and the alphabet or Beethoven and the basic inversions of C major, everything had to start somewhere. Hunt was amazed that from all the unthinkable permutations and variants making up the Multiverse, they were able to come anywhere near this close at all.
For he was not looking just at the familiar Earth, twenty light-years away across space, that they had come from. It was Earth-an Earth-as it had been, if the crude scaling factors that represented the best that could be achieved so far were to be believed, a little less than six months previously. That would put it at not long before the Tramline group's departure-assuming that anything of such a nature had happened, or was even possible, on the world they were looking at. But the fact that they were picking up recognizable communications traffic meant that at least it wasn't a version of Earth that had blown itself up in one of the twentieth century's fits of paranoia or never managed to get beyond windmills and horses in the first place.
"London, Paris, Lisbon, Boston, New York, Rio de Janeiro are all where they should be and looking normal," VISAR reported. "We have indications of lunar bases. Lots of comsats in the synchronous belt." He shouldn't be so amazed, really, Hunt reflected. They had set the parameters that they thought determined the affinity to be pretty close. But even so, it was amazing.
"I think you might be about to go on stage, Vic," Duncan called across.
"Okay, we're into a comnet trunk beam," VISAR told them. "This is looking good. Library structure and directory listings look familiar. UNSA is there… Advanced Sciences at Goddard, yes… Dr. Victor Hunt, Deputy Director, Physics. You didn't get hit by a truck. Temporal calibration is not bad: We're within five days. Do we go with it?"
There was no reason to doubt it, but etiquette required Eesyan to confirm. "Carry on." He was patched in from somewhere in Thurios.
"Call is connecting…"
Hunt felt a curious mixture of feelings: excitement; still more than a little incredulity; a delicious sense of impending mischief that the Thuriens didn't quite seem to understand but went along with; the tension that came with a glimmer of fear that it might still all mess up now. "Think I'll get an encore?" he asked Duncan, who was now a couple of feet away.
And then the view on the screen changed to show… none other than Duncan Watt! The Duncan next to Hunt froze, unable to do more than stare. Hunt waited for a reaction. "Yes, Vic?" A bit anticlimactic, Hunt had to admit. Then the face on the screen knotted in puzzlement. "There's a Thurien behind you. What's going on?"
"Wait till you see who's next to me." Hunt motioned for the nearer Duncan to move into the viewing angle. And Duncan ruined Hunt's act. He had read the transcript of Hunt's original encounter with his own alter ego enough times to know it by heart. Hunt had been saving the line for his other self in this universe-assuming they found him. But Duncan stole it!
"I suppose this must come as a bit of a shock."
Alter-Duncan stared back blankly. He didn't seem able to find any words. Nobody had really expected that he would. "It would take a lot of explaining," Hunt said. "But to give you a hint, think of the work that the Thuriens are doing right now, if my guess is right, to unravel what went on when Broghuilio and his bunch got catapulted across the Multiverse. Let's just say for now that we here are a little way ahead of you. Getting the drift?" The image, still glassy-eyed, managed to return a stupefied nod. "Good. In a nutshell, we've projected a relay into orbit there that's hooked into the comnet and is converting to Multiverse language. A data package should have transferred itself with this call that goes into it all. But while we're through, I was hoping to talk to me; that is 'your' me. Is he around?… Duncan, come on, snap out of it. You have to be prepared for some weird stuff if you're going to mess around with this kind of thing. Believe me, it gets worse. Pay particular attention to the part that talks about convergences. Is Vic around there anywhere?"
Duncan found his voice finally, "He's over in ALS… with Chris Danchekker."
"Put me through, then, would you? There's a good chap. Sorry it couldn't have been longer. Just saying hi as a courtesy, really."
"Yes. Of course… Er… I'll put you through."
"See you around," the calling-end Duncan said automatically, then thought about it. "Well, probably not, actually."
In setting up a file giving the background information, they had prepared themselves better than seemed to have been the case with the group the original Hunt had represented. But then again, that group looked as it had still been working on the stability issue and so perhaps they hadn't been worried about the finer points just yet.
Sandy Holmes took the call in Danchekker's lab over in Alien Life Sciences. She stared uncertainly out from the screen for a second or two, jerked her head around to look back over her shoulder, then at the screen again. "What is this?" she muttered half to herself. "A recording? Is it some kind of joke? Hey, guys, who is this?"
"No, not a recording or a joke. it's me, Vic," Hunt said. "I'm looking for Vic."
He could read Sandy's mind: The image is interacting. He's real. She wrestled with the conundrum, gave up, and turned her head again. "Chris, Vic… Come and look at this." The Sandy watching from a few feet behind Duncan just smiled. She didn't try to muscle in by repeating Duncan's routine of a minute earlier. There would be plenty more times. Two more faces appeared on the screen: Hunt, matter-of-fact; Danchekker looking irritable, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of something. "It's not a recording," Sandy informed them. "It interacts."