An M-space bubble apparently kept time-line convergences contained, restricting them to the inside. Even when Eesyan gave approval for the machine's power to be cautiously increased to a level where convergences had occurred outside the transfer chamber before, nothing was detected. Tests showed that the effect was still there, but confined inside the bubble sitting in the center of the chamber. Outside, the chaos of events and objects with different past histories all being present at the same time and place was eliminated. Nobody was quite sure how this came about, which would no doubt provide the theoreticians with another area of contention that that might keep them occupied for years. But it wasn't the first time, either for Thuriens or for Terrrans, that a practical solution to a problem had preceded the appearance of an elegant theory explaining why it worked.
So the convergence problem was apparently solved-or at least, acceptably contained. When the bubble was combined with the transfer wave function as part of the pattern projected across the Multiverse, it turned out that it did indeed achieve the original aim of confining dispersion as well. So an object sent into another universe could now be induced to remain there.
Creating a bubble required a considerable input of energy. Suitable sources couldn't be carried in the tiny test objects used in the Quelsang experiments, or even the probes being projected from MP2, which were still little more than compact signaling beacons. The method developed, therefore, was to stretch the bubble created at the projector to suppress time line convergence into an elongated filament that the projected wave function expanded at the far end to enclose the test object as well. The bubble thus took an extended dumbbell form of two contained zones connected by a filament that carried the energy to sustain the surface at the far end. When bubble experiments were performed on the transmitters being projected from MP2, it was found that the filament also acted as a conduit for the signal sent back, which if intercepted outside the trapped convergence zone, could be decoded coherently. The filaments were dubbed "umbilicals."
The nice thing about it all was that once the object had consolidated and stabilized, the energy previously fed through to maintain the pattern was no longer required, and the bubble could be switched off. It "really" existed there, in the other universe, and although there was no way of testing it yet, theory indicated that it should thereafter be capable of interacting independently with its surroundings and moving around in them freely.
Although an exemplary achievement, all this was still akin to firing an artillery shell blind and knowing it had landed somewhere. To say where would require knowing something about the surroundings and circumstances that it had landed in. But at least the scientists were now in a position to decode intelligibly any information that was sent back. The next step would be to project objects large enough and complex enough to send back more than just an identification code.
It was something like a reversed form of deja vu. There was the eerie feeling of having been through this before, but this time Hunt was on the other side of it.
He sat in the tower block lab, surrounded by exotically styled equipment, getting used again to the experience that he realized had become unfamiliar, of looking at a hard screen that was really there in front of him. The Thuriens hardly ever used them. What was the point in constructing hardware when the same effect could be generated more easily and with more versatility inside the viewer's head? But for these tests the Thurien scientists had wanted to be sure of capturing exactly what was seen and heard at the far end of the connection.
A half dozen or so of them sat or stood around the room, waiting and watching curiously. The Terrans were there too, with the exceptions of Danchekker, who was meeting with some Thurien philosophers to discuss his theory of consciousness, which he was still developing, and Mildred, away on one of her excursions into the city. The terminal was linked to the MP2 facility, several hundred thousand miles away, which was now fitted with its own internal bubble generator to contain convergence effects. With convergence suppressed, a small staff of researchers and technicians had been installed at MP2 to prepare the various configurations of instruments being despatched. However, the data transmissions back from the instruments were usually relayed to Thurien for monitoring and analysis.
VISAR reported, "The probe platform is stabilizing." On the screen, an image formed of stars in a black background of space. Murmurs came from around the room. Some of the occupants moved closer behind Hunt, although the screen content was being copied neurally via avco. The view slid by as instruments on the probe scanned their surroundings. Earth appeared from an upper corner, showing the Atlantic hemisphere, and moved toward the center, bringing the Moon into view as a three-quarter crescent on one side.
"Right on!" a Thurien voice approved somewhere nearby.
"It makes me feel quite homesick," Sonnebrandt said to nobody in particular.
VISAR announced, hardly necessarily, "Target location is confirmed. It's where we wanted it to be. Starfield distribution and positions of visible planets are consistent with specified time frame.
"Unbelievable!" Chien whispered.
VISAR again: "And we're picking up communications. Processing for system codes and message protocols. This may take a few seconds."
Duncan: "I'd thought we were still months away from anything like this."
Sandy: "These guys are good."
A Thurien: "You ain't seen nothing yet."
Another Thurien: "What does that mean?"
"An Earth saying that my children picked up. Like it?"
VISAR's previous efforts to construct quantum signatures had turned out to be not entirely fruitless. Although failing to achieve the original purpose, the logic of groups and sets that they were based on provided the basis for a method of "mapping" the Multiverse by space and time coordinates, and introducing a measure of "affinity" that could be derived from a virtually an unlimited number of dimensions and grew less as universes became progressively more "different." Exactly in what kind of way they were different, and how rapidly that varied, could only be determined by sending things to various places, trying to make sense of what they found there, and calibrating the results to some kind of scale. The task was probably in a similar league to that of a medieval cartographer of village streets and farms setting out to map the world, and would probably take years to develop into a working, quantitative science, if not generations. But, as with Shakespeare and the alphabet or Beethoven and the basic inversions of C major, everything had to start somewhere. Hunt was amazed that from all the unthinkable permutations and variants making up the Multiverse, they were able to come anywhere near this close at all.
For he was not looking just at the familiar Earth, twenty light-years away across space, that they had come from. It was Earth-an Earth-as it had been, if the crude scaling factors that represented the best that could be achieved so far were to be believed, a little less than six months previously. That would put it at not long before the Tramline group's departure-assuming that anything of such a nature had happened, or was even possible, on the world they were looking at. But the fact that they were picking up recognizable communications traffic meant that at least it wasn't a version of Earth that had blown itself up in one of the twentieth century's fits of paranoia or never managed to get beyond windmills and horses in the first place.
"London, Paris, Lisbon, Boston, New York, Rio de Janeiro are all where they should be and looking normal," VISAR reported. "We have indications of lunar bases. Lots of comsats in the synchronous belt." He shouldn't be so amazed, really, Hunt reflected. They had set the parameters that they thought determined the affinity to be pretty close. But even so, it was amazing.