“What?”
“We must have connected to a different universe, not the one Ponter went to.”
Jasmel’s lower lip quivered.
Adikor hoisted the robot onto its treads. He checked out the cable connector, but, as far as he could tell, it was in fine shape. Jasmel, meanwhile, had gone off, walking slowly, head down, to get the loose end of the fiber-optic cable; she brought it to Adikor, who snapped it into place. He then brought down the two clamps that clicked into notches on the connector’s edge, helping to hold it in position.
At this point, Dern returned with two electric lamps and the spherical battery packs that powered them. He also had a coil of adhesive tape, and he used this to firmly attach the lamps on either side of the robot’s camera eye.
They repositioned the robot exactly as it had been before, right beside register 69, and then the three of them headed back into the control room. Adikor got some equipment boxes and stood on them so that he could simultaneously operate his console and look back over his shoulder onto the computing floor.
He called out the countdown once more: “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
This time, Adikor saw the whole thing. The portal opened like an expanding hoop of blue fire. He heard air rushing around again, and the robot, which seemed to be right on the lip of a precipice, tottered over and disappeared. The control cable went taut, and the blue hoop contracted around its perimeter, then disappeared.
The three of them turned as one to the square video monitor. At first it seemed again that there was no video signal at all, but then the light beams must have caught something—glass or plastic—and they briefly saw a reflection bouncing back at them. But that was all; whatever space the robot was dangling into must be huge.
The lights played across something else—intersecting metallic tubes?—as the robot swung back and forth like a pendulum.
And then, suddenly, there was illumination everywhere, as if—
“Someone must have turned on the lights,” said Jasmel.
It was now clear that the robot was actually twirling at the end of its tether. They caught glimpses of rocky walls, and more rocky walls, and—
“What’s that?” exclaimed Jasmel.
They’d only seen it for an instant: a ladder of some sort, leaning against the curving side of the vast chamber, and, scuttling down the ladder, a slight figure in some sort of blue clothing.
The robot continued to rotate, and they saw that a large geodesic latticework was sitting on the floor, with things like metal flowers at its intersections.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Dern.
“It’s beautiful,” said Jasmel.
Adikor sucked in his breath. The view was still swinging, and it showed the ladder again, two more figures coming down it, and then, maddeningly, the figures disappeared as the robot turned away.
Its rotation offered two more tantalizing glimpses of figures wearing loose-fitting blue body suits, and sporting bright yellow shells on top of their heads. They were way too narrow-shouldered to be men; Adikor thought perhaps they were women, although they were thin even for females. But their faces, glimpsed ever so briefly, seemed devoid of hair, and—
And the image jerked suddenly, then settled down, the robot no longer rotating. A hand had reached in from the side, briefly dominating the camera’s field of view, a strange, weak-looking hand with a short thumb and some sort of metal circle wrapped around one finger. The hand had clearly clamped onto the robot, steadying it. Dern was working frantically with his control box, tipping the camera down as fast as it would go, and they got their first good look at the face of the being now reaching up and clutching the hanging robot.
Dern gasped. Adikor felt his stomach knotting. The creature was hideous, deformed, with a lower jaw that protruded as if the bone within were encrusted by growths.
The repulsive being was still holding on to the robot, trying to pull it down, closer to the ground; the robot’s treads seemed to be about half a bodylength above the floor of the vast chamber.
As the robot’s camera tilted, Adikor could see that there was an opening in the bottom of the geodesic sphere, as if part of it had been disassembled. Lying on the chamber’s floor were giant, curved pieces of glass or transparent plastic piled up one atop another; they must have been what had originally caught the robot’s lamps. Those curved pieces of glass looked like they might have once formed a huge sphere.
They could now intermittently see three of the same beings, all equally deformed. Two of them were also devoid of facial hair. One was pointing directly at the robot; his arm looked like a twig.
Jasmel placed her hands on her hips and shook her head slowly back and forth. “What are they?”
Adikor shook his head in wonder.
“They’re primates of some sort,” said Jasmel.
“Not chimpanzees or bonobos,” said Dern.
“No,” said Adikor, “although they’re scrawny enough. But they’re mostly hairless. They look more like us than like apes.”
“It’s too bad they’re wearing those strange pieces of headgear,” said Dern. “I wonder what they’re for?”
“Protection?” suggested Adikor.
“Not very efficient, if so,” said Dern. “If something fell on their heads, their necks, not their shoulders, would take the weight.”
“There’s no sign of my father,” said Jasmel, sadly.
All three of them were quiet for a time. Then Jasmel spoke again. “You know what they look like? They look like primitive humans—like those fossils you see in galdarab halls.”
Adikor took a couple of steps backward, literally staggered by the notion. He found a chair, spun it around on its base, and lowered himself into it.
“Gliksin people,” he said, the term coming to him; Gliksin was the region in which such fossils—the only primates known without browridges and with those ridiculous protuberances from the lower jaw—had first been found.
Could their experiment have reached across world lines, accessing universes that had split from this one long before the creation of the quantum computer? No, no. Adikor shook his head. It was too much, too crazy. After all, the Gliksin people had gone extinct—well, the figure half a million months ago popped into his head, but he wasn’t sure if it was correct. Adikor rubbed the edge of his hand back and forth above his browridge. The only sound was the drone of the air-purification equipment; the only smells, their own sweat and pheromones.
“This is huge,” Dern said softly. “This is gigantic.”
Adikor nodded slowly. “Another version of Earth. Another version of humanity.”
“It’s talking!” exclaimed Jasmel, pointing at one of the figures visible on the screen. “Turn up the sound!”
Dern reached for a control. “Speech,” said Adikor, shaking his head in wonder. “I’d read that Gliksin people were incapable of speech, because their tongues were too short.”
They listened to the being talking, although the words made no sense.
“It sounds so strange,” said Jasmel. “Like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”
The Gliksin in the foreground had stopped pulling on the robot, evidently realizing that there was no more cable to be payed out. He moved away, and other Gliksins loomed in to have a look. It took Adikor a moment to realize that there were both males and females present; both kinds mostly had naked faces, although a few of the men did have beards. The females generally seemed smaller, but, on a few at least, the breasts were obvious beneath the clothes.
Jasmel looked out at the computing floor. “The gateway seems to be staying open just fine,” she said. “I wonder how long it can be maintained?”
Adikor was wondering that, too. The proof, the evidence that would save him, and his son Dab, and his sister Kelon, was right there: an alternative world! But Daklar Bolbay would doubtless claim the pictures, being recorded on video of course, were fake, sophisticated computer-generated imagery. After all, she’d say, Adikor had access to the most powerful computers on the planet.