"Yes, it does. Try me," Hunt offered.
Danchekker blinked rapidly several times through his spectacles, then turned to the Hunt who was with him, "What kind of stunt is this, Vic? If it has a point, I'm afraid it eludes me. We really do have a lot to get through."
The other Hunt shook his head helplessly. "No, honestly, Chris, I don't know any more than you do. It's got nothing to…" He looked back from the screen as an answer suggested itself. "It has to be a VISAR creation. VISAR, are you in on this? What's the idea?"
"I am, but only as the phone operator. It isn't a creation," VISAR's voice replied on the circuit. In an aside voice that was clearly for local ears only, it inquired, "Do you want me to tell him?"
"Sure," Hunt said.
"It's you. Or another one of you, that is. We're plugged into your comnet from orbit from Thurien. Another Thurien, that is."
Hunt could almost hear the thoughts racing through his other self's head. "A Multiverse version?" the image said finally. "MV cross-communication? Does that mean you've cracked it?"
Cheers and applause came from all around. VISAR showed a copy of the panned view it was sending through of the room full of Thuriens and Terrans.
"Extraordinary!" Danchekker pronounced weakly.
The subsequent exchange followed roughly the lines it had with Duncan, but going into a little more detail.
The package of technical data was just a gift thrown in as a goodwill gesture. The people in the universe sending it could derive no benefit, since they of course possessed the information already. The real purpose of this series of tests, which would visit other versions of both Earth and Thurien, and of which this was just a beginning, would be for VISAR to extract as much reference information as it could collect describing the universe that the probe had arrived in-physical characteristics; geography; history; political and social organization; technology; arts; customs; anything that could be accessed in the time available. By correlating the results of many such searches with the settings programmed in at the projector, it was hoped to build up an enormous database that would enable the "affinity" parameter to be interpreted in more everyday-meaningful terms. The phone chat really wasn't necessary. In fact, most of the planned tests omitted it. It could only get repetitive, and the novelty would doubtless wear off very quickly. But in the meantime, the impulse to try a few just to see the results had been irresistible. It also explained, perhaps, why the original alter-ego of Hunt had been so agreeably chatty.
Hunt refrained from saying anything about investment tips for Jerry Santello. It looked as if his other self was going to have more than enough to think about. And besides, he wasn't really that sure himself what the Formaflex business was all about.
Now that it was possible to identify where and when a projected probe had arrived at, this series of tests also enabled another prediction of Multiverse theory to be verified. An intriguing thought that had occurred to everybody involved was that sending probes ahead in time to closely related universes sounded like the next best thing to being able to read the future. The energy balance equations, however, said it wasn't quite so simple. The resolution of uncertainty that events unfolding in the forward direction of time represented took form in the second law of thermodynamics, expressed as increasing entropy. Multiverse physics related entropy and energy in such a way that projecting into another universe required more and more energy as the time of the target reality came closer to "now" at the sending end, becoming infinite when the time difference became zero. In other words, an energy barrier seemed to exist that precluded peeking into the future. Whether that too might be broken one day, no one was prepared to say or even guess. The tests at MP2 confirmed, however, that the restriction was very real for the time being.
True, the transmissions from probes projected back in time were traveling across the Multiverse and into their future. But the MV equations talked about the projection energy of the defining wave function, not the subsequent flow of signal energy and information. In their case this had been supplied from the sending end.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
If Porthik Eesyan had been of an inclination to place bets, he would just have lost out spectacularly. Betting on outcomes of events was not a habit among Thuriens, and they had nothing comparable to organized gambling on sports; but it was catching on as part of the general Terran influence. Although he had wished his scientists well, his personal belief had been that it was too early yet to expect coherent communications with another part of the Multiverse. They had barely finished the tests after installing the bubble generator at MP2, and that was little more than the original lab prototype, patched and modified as experience was gained and then hastily rushed out as soon as the first consistent results were confirmed. But the instrumentation people, inspired by the glimpses they had caught of probes actually arriving from other realities, had already been pressing ahead with designs of sensor packages and communications relays of their own. When the bubble turned out to be the answer to convergence, there had been no restraining them. It wasn't like the old days of orderly, planned and controlled progress at all. Eesyan put it down to another example of Terran influence making itself felt-this time inside his own department!
Terrans!
Like most Thuriens, he still hadn't arrived at a final analysis concerning this race of emotional, opinionated, aggressive and squabblesome, pink-to-black dwarves. The aspect of them that troubled Frenua Showm was their violence-appalling enough, to be sure; and how it could be elevated to being admired as a virtue, with honors bestowed for proficiency in commanding it and whole industries devoted to optimizing its results, was a question that was surely the proper province only of psychiatrists. But Showm was a sociologist of exo-cultures and a political historian, and factors like that were central to her work. That side of Terran nature rarely affected Eesyan directly. The side of them that was more apparent from the standpoint of scientific advisor and research director, especially with regard to the conduct of this joint project he was now committed to, was their impulsiveness.
The traditional Thurien ways might seem slow and cautious by comparison, but they were solid and reliable. In the Great Age of expansion, when Minerva had been left to the Lunarians, who subsequently destroyed it, earlier generations of Thuriens had built the cores of the huge cities, created the foundations of the network that grew into VISAR, and engineered an energy conversion and distribution system that connected far-flung star systems. All of these creations did what they were designed to do, and they didn't fail. No Thurien engineer could have conceived how things could be otherwise. Would a chef be acceptable who only poisoned the odd guest or two occasionally? Eesyan had heard stories from Earth of equipment being installed with known flaws, vehicles going out of control, structures falling down-usually through overzealous pursuit of their upside-down value system that rewarded ownership of wealth more than the creation of it-but what went on there was their business.
When it started impacting programs that he was responsible for, however, it was another matter. To have come from the first successful experiments at Quelsang to launching a functioning communications probe from MP2 in six months was, to Eesyan's mind, unpardonably reckless. The greatest factor contributing to the success had been pure luck, and looking back, it had been thanks to nothing more that no irremediable consequence of convergence had been experienced at Quelsang before they realized what was happening-such as being stuck with a duplicate of somebody marooned from another universe. And even then, he had been so touched himself by the rush of enthusiasm that he had let himself be persuaded to order just that the power be reduced, when the correct thing would have been to shut everything down until they had some idea of what they were doing. He attributed it to the Terrans. They could exhibit failings and live with consequences that would condemn a Thurien to a lifetime of dejection and remorse. Most Thuriens deplored it, although some saw it as a strength that it would serve them to have more of themselves at times-for instance, over the ongoing hangups about some of the actions of their distant ancestors. Eesyan had no firm opinion either way. What he did know just at this point, however, was that he wasn't sure how to deal with it.