Hunt had to smile, It would have come to her so naturally that he should have guessed-as naturally as calling Caldwell and saying she needed help with a book.
Gina finished her drink. “How’d I do?” she asked in a lowered voice.
“Terrific. I’m sure you’ve got another profession waiting if you find you’ve got tired of books.”
“Is anyone still interested in us, do you think?”
Hunt shook his head. “We can just be natural now. If anyone gets curious later about how you got mixed up with the UNSA group, there were enough witnesses. So, forget any more Mata Hari stuff. Have you had lunch?”
“I’m still too excited about this whole business to have much of an appetite,” Gina answered. “But this ship is fantastic! What do you think the chances would be of getting to see more of it while we’re here?”
“Oh, pretty good, I should think.” Hunt raised his voice slightly. “VISAR, could you take us on a tour around the Vishnu?”
“Be my guests,” the machine replied.
They stood amidst stupefying constructions of gleaming metallic shapes, walls of light, and what looked like clean-cut massifs, as big as buildings, of internally glowing crystal. It was all too devoid of even a hint of anything recognizable for Hunt to form any coherent questions for VISAR of what it meant.
“You seem… impressed,” Gina said, finding a tactful word to describe the look on Hunt’s face.
His frown switched to a faint grin. “It is a bit much for one afternoon, isn’t it?” he agreed. “This is all a long way past the ship from Minerva that we found on Ganymede. That was from the same era as the Shapieron. We thought it was pretty spectacular at the time. But compared to this it was like the boiler room of a tramp steamer.”
“They produce some kind of ‘stress wave,’ or something, don’t they?” Gina said. “A bubble of bent space-time around the ship. That’s what moves through space, carrying the ship with it. Since the ship is at rest relative to the space inside the bubble, the usual speed limits don’t apply.”
“That’s right. The rules for space propagating through space are different.” Hunt shook his head wonderingly. “Is there anything you don’t get interested in?”
“I told you, journalists are curious, like scientists.”
Hunt nodded. “The Shapieron used a system that constrained superdense masses to move in closed paths at relativistic speeds, which generated high rates of change of gravitic potential and created a matter-annihilation zone that powered the stress field. The equipment to do it was colossal, but I don’t see anything like it here. But there has to be something like it to get us out past Pluto, where the entry port will be projected for transfer to Jevlen. VISAR, how has it changed?”
“That’s all done remotely now,” VISAR replied. “The stress wave is generated by small converters located around the extremities of the ship and coupling into the Thurien i-space grid. The ship itself can be quite compact. Remember the one that landed in Alaska?”
“I take it this is the kind of thing you’re finding out more about at Goddard,” Gina said to Hunt.
“Trying to, anyway. There’s a lot of it. Half the problem is getting the information organized.”
“Have there been any big surprises so far-I mean, apart from the ones we’ve read about? You know: the universe is bigger than we thought, smaller than we thought; parallel universes are real; Einstein was wrong. Anything like that?”
Hunt looked around from the rail he was leaning on. “Well, it’s funny you should mention Einstein,” he said.
“You mean he was wrong?”
“Not wrong, exactly… but unnecessarily complicated, like Ptolemy’s planetary orbits. It all works out a lot more simply and still agrees with the same experimental results if you take the velocity that matters as being not that with respect to the observer at all, but with respect to the traversed gravitational field. The distortions of space that Einstein was forced to postulate turn out to be simply compensations for the breakdown of the inverse square law at high speeds, caused by the finite propagation speed of gravity. If you allow for that, then practically everything in relativity can be deduced by classical methods.”
Gina stared at him as if unable to decide whether he was joking or being serious. “You mean everybody missed it?”
“Yes,” Hunt answered, nodding. “Take the business with Mercury’s perihelion, for instance. You know about that?”
“I thought that Einstein’s answer works; Newton’s doesn’t.”
“So do most people,” Hunt agreed. He looked away and snorted. “But all the prestige and money for practically the last century has come for building more spectacular gadgets, not for going over the basics of physics. Do you know what VISAR found while it was browsing through some old European archives?”
“What?”
“The same formula that Einstein obtained through Riemannian geometry and gravitational tensors was derived classically by a German called Paul Gerber, in 1898, when Einstein was nine years old. It was there all the time, but everybody missed it.”
The Vishnu was home for several hundred thousand Thuriens for periods that varied from short-term to permanent. They lived in baffling urban complexes that resembled their labyrinthine cities back home, amid simulations of external vistas beneath artificial skies, and in isolated spots enjoying the peculiarities of various landscapes, copied and contrived. Life aboard the ship combined all the functions of a complete social and professional infrastructure. The whole thing, Hunt began to realize, was more an elaborate, mobile space colony than anything conventionally thought of on Earth as a means of transportation.
“This is the kind of vessel typically sent out to explore local regions of the Galaxy,” VISAR confirmed. “It might spend several years at a newly discovered planetary system.”
Evidently the Thuriens liked to take their comforts with them.
Hunt and Gina sat on a boulder on a grassy slope overlooking a lake with a distinctly curved surface. There were boats on it, scattered among several islands, and on the opposite shore an intricate composition of terraced architecture that went up to the “sky.” The sky was pale blue-like that of Thurien. The bushes around where they were sitting had broad, wedge-shaped, purple leaves that opened and folded like fans. According to VISAR, they could shed their roots and migrate downhill on bulbous pseudopods if the soil became too dry.
“How would you classify them?” Gina mused. “If animals move and plants don’t, what are they?”
“Why does it matter what you call them?” Hunt said. “When people have problems with questions like that, it’s usually because they’re trying to make reality fit something from their kit of standard labels. They’d be better off thinking about rewriting the labels.”
They contemplated the scenery in silence for a while.
“It’s funny how evolution works,” Gina said. “Purely random factors can send it all off in a completely new direction-ones that operate at high level, I mean, not just genetic mutation. About ninety-five percent of all species were supposed to have been wiped out in a mass extinction that happened around two hundred million years ago. It didn’t favor any particular kind of animaclass="underline" large or small, marine or land-dwelling, complex or simple, or anything like that. Nothing can adapt for catastrophes on that kind of scale. So the survivors were simply the lucky five percent. Whole families vanished for no particular reason at all, and the few that were left determined the entire pattern of life subsequently.” She looked at Hunt, as if asking him to confirm it.
“I don’t know too much about that side of things,” he said. “Chris Danchekker’s the one you ought to be talking to.” He stood up and offered her a hand. “Speaking of which, we ought to be getting back. It’s about time you met the rest of the crew.”