In the event, the worries turned out to have been misplaced. The first trial in which the Shapieron was dematerialized from the Gate was a very cautious affair that involved merely shifting it a few hundred miles to a beacon positioned not far away in the Gistar system of a reality that was very "close." ZORAC almost caused coronaries by faking a system crash for several seconds before announcing that it was fine and the experience had actually been less unsettling than a regular transfer through h-space. As confidence grew, the scope of the tests was gradually increased until pitching a beacon out across the Multiverse (exactly "where" to was still not something that could be predetermined with any exactness), sending the Shapieron to home on it, and then bringing the Shapieron back had been demonstrated as a task that could be repeated at will. And that brought them finally to the second hurdle that there was no way around: the first trial involving living people.
It was their project, the Thuriens pointed out; the privilege of sending the first being should be theirs. The Terrans reminded them that it was they who had been contacted by the relay bringing the message that had put them all on the right track, so they should have the first shot. Nobody was quite certain of the logic by which this conclusion followed, but it was the best argument that anyone on the Terran team could come up with, so they all pretended not to be aware of the non sequitur. Wrangling continued until the matter got back to Caldwell, whose reply was simply, "Why not send one of each?" Why not? Like so many obvious things, it was obvious once somebody had said it.
Then, of course, the question became, Who, from each? Since Hunt was officially the leader of the Terran group, there was no question in his mind that it meant him-there was an old principle about officers not expecting the men to do anything they weren't prepared to do themselves, and in any case it suited his temperament. Duncan Watt disputed this on the grounds that Hunt's experience made him less expendable, which Hunt read as a cheap ploy by Duncan to get himself some glory. The Thuriens were at a bit of a loss to follow these intricacies, since the concept of personal glory meant little to them anyway. Danchekker contacted Caldwell privately to confide the view Duncan was right in maintaining that Vic shouldn't be put at risk, small though the risk might be, and suggested it might be appropriate for Caldwell to pull rank and take the decision out of Hunt's hands. Caldwell, however, knew that seeing the leader overruled wouldn't be good for the group and elected not to interfere, leaving it to Hunt to assert his position by pulling rank instead-as Caldwell knew he would. That much having been settled, the Thuriens took a dissent-free view that if the Terrans were putting forward the head of their group, the Thuriens would do likewise. So Hunt and Eesyan, it turned out to be.
They had to travel out to MP2 for the test, and wear space suits. The original transfer chamber at Quelsang wasn't big enough to take a single human, let alone an eight-foot Thurien as well. The reason MP2 had been built remotely in space and projected its test objects into distant regions was to avoid the hazards associated with things rematerializing inside solid matter. The same considerations applied when it came to projecting people-if anything, more so. Hence the suits.
They stood gripping a handrail on a raised grating in the metal-walled chamber. A clutter of monitoring heads and instrument mountings filled the space around them, packed between the apertures of the projector barrels angling in from all directions. In several places, eyes looked in on them through observation ports. Below the grating was the five-foot diameter sphere containing the convergence suppressor. No doubt the strange things that happened with time would become a subject for further research one day, but for present purposes they would remain confined in there. As a test object, Hunt and Eesyan were well below the size where carrying a local bubble generator became necessary.
Although Hunt had maintained a light-hearted attitude all the way through to now, this all had a sinister and oppressive feeling. He felt like the victim in some macabre, over-elaborate execution ritual. His usual inclination toward banter had deserted him. The suit readings were all good, projector systems counting down; there was nothing much to be said. Although Caldwell was patched in from Earth again, he was being reticent this time. It was as if he could read Hunt's mood. Typical Gregg, Hunt thought to himself.
"Everything okay?" the Thurien supervising scientist's voice inquired inside Hunt's helmet.
"All okay."
"As ready as we'll be," Eesyan said.
The black mouths of the projectors flickered yellow for an instant, then stabilized to a uniform, depthless indigo. "Sequencing out… Transferring."
And Hunt was floating in space. This was not some virtual illusion manufactured by VISAR, that he was experiencing in a neural coupler somewhere. He was really out here-several thousand miles from MP2, if all had gone as scheduled. It seemed to have-Hunt could see one of the beacons at a distance he judged to be a mile or less away. With live beings involved in the test, Eesyan had stipulated sending a backup beacon ahead in addition to the regular homing beacon. As Hunt gyrated slowly, Eesyan came into view, sliding by with the starfield. His long Ganymean face was turning this way and that inside the headpiece of the Thurien space suit as he took in the surroundings. Hunt could feel his gloominess of only a few moments ago giving way to a strangely exhilarating sense of awe.
He had to remind himself of what had just happened. Every one of the particles that composed his body had been converted to a component of a wave pattern projected and stabilized a short way across the Multiverse. There, drawing on energy beamed through by the projectors, the wave components had condensed into the nodes that define material particles, reconstituting the configuration that equated to Victor Hunt.
This was him now, a structure frozen out of vibrating local energy condensations, just as the one back at MP2 had been. A containment bubble sustained through the M-space umbilical from the projectors was keeping the pattern together while it found a local energy balance and stabilized.
"How are we reading?" the supervisor's voice checked.
"Everything appears to be admirable," Eesyan replied.
"Vic?"
"Oh… fine. Just fine."
"It's looking good from here. Are we clear to go to the next phase?" There would have been nothing to be gained by not completing the process once they had gotten this far. Eesyan looked across. Hunt gave a double thumbs-up with his gauntlets and nodded.
"Proceed," Eesyan said.
"Dissolving bubble now."
They allowed several seconds to elapse. The indicators on Hunt's sleeve panel that monitored the status of the link channel changed to null readings suddenly. "This is Eesyan, calling Control. Testing." There was no response. Hunt tried and got the same result.
"I guess we're on our own," Hunt said over the local channel.
"Sobering to contemplate, indeed."
For the MP2 that Hunt could make out as a point of light gleaming in the direction opposite to Gistar was not the MP2 they had come from. He was staring out through his helmet visor at a different universe. And he and Eesyan were now part of it. There could be another Hunt inside this MP2 there, right now; and if not, there would almost certainly be one somewhere on the Thurien behind his right shoulder, looking the size of a dime. The beacon that had appeared over ten minutes ago now was probably causing consternation already. Hunt grinned to himself as he pictured the reactions if the Thurien senors had resolved in addition two space-suited figures floating miles from anywhere in space.