Cullen stared at Murray for a moment longer, then snorted impatiently. “Get him out of here,” he said, motioning at Koberg. Then he called toward the door, “Lebansky, call the wagon. We’re not gonna-”
Murray raised both hands protectively. “Okay, okay… they’re called the China-”
“We know about them,” Cullen murmured to Hunt. “Protection rake-offs, intimidation and persuasion, a lot of black-market operations with the situation we’ve got right now.” Hunt nodded.
Murray went on. “They’ve got a racket going for the headworld freaks. Ever since the Gs pulled the plug on JEVEX, the price has been going outta sight.” He showed a palm briefly. “There are still places you can go if you know the right people and you’ve got the bread.”
“How come, if JEVEX is shut down?” Hunt asked, more to see how much Murray knew and if he was straight.
“Hell, how do I know? I’m not a tech. It’s not completely shut down-I don’t know why. There are people around who can get a hookup into it, or who look the other way if the price is right. Get the idea?”
“How does this tie in with Baumer?” Cullen asked.
“He’s a headword. He got hooked soon after he got here. There’s this club, kind of exclusive, known as the Gondola. It’s got booths out back that you only get to know about if you’ve got the connections. That’s where he goes all the time.”
“Where is this place?” Cullen asked.
“Not too far. Five or six blocks.”
“Can you get us in? Nobody’s going to bust the place. We just want to see if Baumer’s there.”
Murray shook his head. “Hell, what do you think I am? I’m just a guy who hitched a ride to this planet.”
“But you’ve got contacts,” Hunt said. “Do you know someone who can? It’s urgent, Murray.”
“Maybe… I’d have to make a few calls.”
“Then start making them.”
“What am I supposed to tell them? Why should they be interested in helping you?”
“If they don’t, it could be the end of their operation.”
“Give me a few minutes.” Murray went over to the COM panel and sat down.
Hunt looked at Cullen curiously. “So how did Baumer come to get the connections so quickly?” he mused. “From what Murray says, he’d only just arrived.”
“They gave him a freebie as a hook,” Cullen said. “Got themselves a tame Terran inside PAC.”
Hunt nodded slowly. It was all beginning to make sense. Baumer had been identified early on as a likely potential addict. That was how they had controlled him. So at least that answered one of the sets of questions on Hunt’s list. He looked across anxiously at Murray, who was tapping a code into the touchpad. Baumer’s motivation wasn’t an aspect of it all that Hunt was particularly concerned about just at that moment.
At PAC, Danchekker and Shilohin were putting further questions to Nixie, who was coupled into VISAR. Nixie was allowing VISAR to monitor her thought processes and recollections as she described them.
“You’re saying that in this world that you claim to be from, there weren’t any gadgets at all as we know them, beyond simple implements?” Shilohin said. “No machines, even rudimentary ones?”
“It wasn’t possible to put pieces together that could work the way they can here,” Nixie answered. She made a helpless gesture. “How do I explain this?” She leveled a forearm to point at Shilohin. “If a thing is that long, maybe this way, then it is different when it goes that way.” She rotated her arm horizontally through a right angle. “And all through the day everything changes, too, even without moving. But in this world nothing makes any difference. Everything’s always the same. Everywhere there’s this magical lawfulness, and impossible things become possible.” She looked questioningly from one to the other.
“The images are consistent with a physics in which the relative dimensions of an object, and hence its shape, are not invariant with its state of motion,” VISAR interpreted, analyzing the pictures in Nixie’s mind. “So it was not possible to construct mechanisms whose parts would move freely under all conditions. The changes with directional orientation and the regular, superposed daily cycle can be understood as secondary effects due to planetary rotation.”
“We are on a planet, then,” Shilohin concluded.
“So it would appear,” VISAR agreed.
Danchekker sat forward and rubbed his brow. “Perhaps I’m getting confused. How is the planet rotating? I thought we established earlier that rotation was unknown for some reason. Wasn’t the notion of spinning objects considered to be something mystical-conceivable as an ideal, but unattainable in practice?”
“Not quite,” VISAR replied. “Unconstrained rotation was common enough. Matter elongated in the direction of motion. Thus a stick thrown into the air, for example, turning about its center, would transform into two wedges connected at their vertices. Moving things changed their dimensions. So there was no effective way of fitting fixed and moving parts together in the kinds of way necessary to build machines. They couldn’t even get axles and bearings to work.”
Danchekker sat back on his chair again, baffled. “The extraordinary thing is that she doesn’t seem capable of inventing it,” he mused. “Her grasp of even the elementary principles of mechanics is virtually nonexistent.”
Nixie shrugged without taking any offense.
“It is indeed as if her fundamental concepts had been formed in another world,” Danchekker went on.
“Which seems to exist in space as we know it, but with different laws of physics,” Shilohin said. She looked back at Nixie. “You say that solid objects could interpenetrate?”
“Yes,” Nixie assured her.
“Under the right conditions,” VISAR qualified.
“And solid matter didn’t always exhibit permanency? Things could just appear out of nowhere?”
“Not often, but apparently so,” VISAR confirmed.
“Or on other occasions might vanish?”
“In her childhood she remembers an entire landscape changing overnight.”
“And supernatural powers worked. With training and discipline, people could learn to produce such effects at will, by mind power alone? Some acquired the ability to see visions in these mysterious ‘currents’ that we’ve heard about, which pervaded everything.” Shilohin looked at Danchekker and tossed up a hand briefly. “And even more amazing, these visions were of this world-our everyday one. Such people could attach themselves physically to these currents that flowed to the sky, and rise up-and that’s how Nixie came here.”
VISAR projected an image onto one of the laboratory’s wall screens, created from information encoded in Nixie’s memory patterns. It showed armored warriors with spears and shields falling back in panic as a glowing figure that was floating in the sky directed streaks of exploding lightning down among them. Another image showed a man in robes and a high headdress slowly passing a shining rod through a slab of solid rock, without a mark or opening upon it. There were strange creatures, one with legs that looked like snakes, another that divided into two living halves.
The scenes were the nearest that VISAR could construct to representations that would be meaningful to human nervous systems, conditioned by familiar imagery; the literal data would have been incomprehensible. The humanlike figures on the screen, for instance, were artifacts of the conversion performed by VISAR, not forms that Nixie had actually seen as depicted.
“How?” Shilohin asked, mystified. “How could such things be possible?”
“Ah, well… that’s another question,” VISAR said.
“Could it be some aberration in the Jevlenese communications system, do you think?” Shilohin asked. “Could an i-space link have somehow made a connection to a distant part of the universe that we never knew existed?”
“I can’t say it’s impossible,” VISAR answered.