And even if he did get some serious and sympathetic attention here and there, the conflicts of interests were so tangled and the true motivations behind them so guarded that any initiative he might manage to spark would be diluted away by countermands and bureaucratic obstruction long before it cold grow into anything coordinated and effective on an global scale. He should know, having played a significant part in coordinating one of the biggest international ventures of modern times. But the Space Arm had come into being and been able to function as it had precisely because all the financial and political forces aligned behind it had stood to gain. They were unlikely to show the same capacity for concerted action when they saw themselves as being asked to renounce the very opportunities for expanding and diversifying and generally outperforming their rivals that had spurred them before.
Caldwell wasn't going to change human nature or the way it shaped the world; at least, not anytime soon. The only other factor in the equation was the Thurien disposition that viewed humans as violently disposed aliens-to be accommodated generously if their inclinations could be curbed and redirected; but if not… who knew what? On the face of it, Caldwell didn't see that he could do much to change that either. It would need something that lessened the distance between them emotionally and psychologically, so that the "alienness" was reduced; that made humans "family," the way he accepted Mildred within his Division of UNSA.
After Minerva's destruction, the Thuriens had shown their capability and potential willingness to form such close ties in the way they had taken the Lambian element of the Lunarians back and tried to integrate them into their civilization-later to become the Jevlenese. But that attempt had been marred by the intrusion of the Ents from the surreal world of computing symbology that came into being inside JEVEX. The Cerians, at their own request, had remained in their own Solar System after being transported to Earth and become the ancestral Terrans. The separation since then had produced the sense of alienism underlying the superficially cordial relations that existed now.
What was needed was some unifying event or experience that would overwhelm all other considerations, something momentous enough in the minds of Thuriens-and humans too-to weld their two races into one with a common future with the kind of affinity the Thuriens had been able to show for the Jevlenese. But what?
Then news came in from Hunt saying that Eesyan's group of Thurien scientists thought they had cracked the time line convergence problem. If so, it meant they were on the verge of getting coherent information back from other parts of the Multiverse. Caldwell spent several hours in his office, studying the report that followed and pondering on its implications. Slowly, a vision formed in his mind of a time when the gulf that divided them now hadn't existed; a time when the divergent histories of Ganymeans, Terrans, Lunarians, Jevlenese, all came together at a world that had existed long ago.
Enough thinking, he decided then. It was time to give rein to his instincts and circumvent the system. The old Irish adage that "contrition is easier than permission" came to mind. A warm, invigorating feeling of the old Gregg Caldwell moving into action again surged through him. He reached out to his deskside console and entered the code to access Advanced Sciences Division's channel into the Thurien net. VISAR's voice spoke a few seconds later.
"Gregg Caldwell. Hello, it's been a while."
"Yeah, well, you don't have a building full of people and a family at home to run."
"Try a couple of dozen star systems."
"Okay, you've got me. But it's nice to talk again."
"Likewise. What can I do for you?"
"Can you tell me how Calazar is fixed? I need to talk with him. And I'd like it to be face-to-face through the virtual system, not just a call."
"When did you have in mind?"
"Whenever it suits him. I'm free right now."
"Just a second."
Caldwell tapped his fingers absently, imagining a computer out at the other star interrupting an alien in the middle of something right now. It still seemed uncanny. Boy, had the church of Einstein gotten that one wrong.
Then, "Calazar says 'hi and great to hear from you.' He's coupled into the system now, as it turns out. If it's business, how about making it the Government Center in Thurios?"
"Fine. Give me two minutes."
Cadwell got up and walked through to the outer office. Mitzi was away on some errand. He carried on through to the corridor and along to the room where the neurocouplers were installed. He had thoughts on and off of putting one in his office but hadn't made his mind up yet. Gimmicks to impress visitors wasn't his style, and it would have better use out where it was, available for anyone. He lay back with the feeling it always gave him of being at the dentist's. Moments later he was standing in a brightly decorated room of marble walls, rich furnishings, floor coverings, and draperies, with a window looking out at towers and soaring arches. Calazar was sitting on a couch before a low table with several other seats positioned around it.
"Your timing was excellent. I was just catching up on some reading." The alien stood and gestured at one of the seats. "Join me, please."
No, he was supposed to stop thinking "alien," Caldwell reminded himself. That was what this whole visit was about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
VISAR had abandoned its attempts to solve the convergence problem by generating a "quantum signature" unique to a particular universe, by means of which other universes could effectively be locked out. Although the concept was sound enough, it turned out that the amount of information needed to define a stable zone increased exponentially with the size of the zone. This meant that beyond trivial experiments that had little value other than to demonstrate the principle, the amount of calculation necessary to achieve a realistic operating volume capable of supporting anything worthwhile rose rapidly toward infinity, taxing the capacity of even something like VISAR. The Thurien mathematicians held hopes they might find some form of short-cut or algorithm that would render the problem tractable, but they were the first to admit that as of now they had no clear idea of what they were looking for, and the search for a solution, if one existed at all, could well take years.
The breakthrough came from a completely unexpected direction that didn't involve mathematicians or advanced theoreticians at all, but space propulsion engineers. Thurien spacecraft operated by an advanced form of the drive employed in the Shapieron, going back to the early days of Ganymean Minerva, whereby the ship was carried inside a propagating "bubble" of distorted spacetime. Whereas modern Thurien vessels drew their power from the interstellar grid beamed through h-space, the Shapieron used its own onboard generators. Some of Eesyan's group had been looking into the separate problem of maintaining coherence of the standing wave that defined an object projected out across the Multiverse, hence halting it. The method worked, but it was unstable. After a brief existence ranging so far from fractions of a second to a minute or so, the wave would break up-not observed directly, but inferred from observations of objects arriving from other universes that had done so in this one.
Eesyan's scientists had approached the space-drive designers to find out more about how this bubble was created, their thought being that something like it might be contrived to contain the standing wave pattern in such a way that would prevent it from dispersing. It seemed, when they looked into it, that adapting the technique to M-space should be fairly straightforward-it involved a longitudinal form of the same type of wave that the engineers had long experience of dealing with. But when preliminary experiments were run at Quelsang to investigate the creation of M-space bubbles, a completely unexpected result was observed.