"I think you might be about to go on stage, Vic," Duncan called across.
"Okay, we're into a comnet trunk beam," VISAR told them. "This is looking good. Library structure and directory listings look familiar. UNSA is there… Advanced Sciences at Goddard, yes… Dr. Victor Hunt, Deputy Director, Physics. You didn't get hit by a truck. Temporal calibration is not bad: We're within five days. Do we go with it?"
There was no reason to doubt it, but etiquette required Eesyan to confirm. "Carry on." He was patched in from somewhere in Thurios.
"Call is connecting…"
Hunt felt a curious mixture of feelings: excitement; still more than a little incredulity; a delicious sense of impending mischief that the Thuriens didn't quite seem to understand but went along with; the tension that came with a glimmer of fear that it might still all mess up now. "Think I'll get an encore?" he asked Duncan, who was now a couple of feet away.
And then the view on the screen changed to show… none other than Duncan Watt! The Duncan next to Hunt froze, unable to do more than stare. Hunt waited for a reaction. "Yes, Vic?" A bit anticlimactic, Hunt had to admit. Then the face on the screen knotted in puzzlement. "There's a Thurien behind you. What's going on?"
"Wait till you see who's next to me." Hunt motioned for the nearer Duncan to move into the viewing angle. And Duncan ruined Hunt's act. He had read the transcript of Hunt's original encounter with his own alter ego enough times to know it by heart. Hunt had been saving the line for his other self in this universe-assuming they found him. But Duncan stole it!
"I suppose this must come as a bit of a shock."
Alter-Duncan stared back blankly. He didn't seem able to find any words. Nobody had really expected that he would. "It would take a lot of explaining," Hunt said. "But to give you a hint, think of the work that the Thuriens are doing right now, if my guess is right, to unravel what went on when Broghuilio and his bunch got catapulted across the Multiverse. Let's just say for now that we here are a little way ahead of you. Getting the drift?" The image, still glassy-eyed, managed to return a stupefied nod. "Good. In a nutshell, we've projected a relay into orbit there that's hooked into the comnet and is converting to Multiverse language. A data package should have transferred itself with this call that goes into it all. But while we're through, I was hoping to talk to me; that is 'your' me. Is he around?… Duncan, come on, snap out of it. You have to be prepared for some weird stuff if you're going to mess around with this kind of thing. Believe me, it gets worse. Pay particular attention to the part that talks about convergences. Is Vic around there anywhere?"
Duncan found his voice finally, "He's over in ALS… with Chris Danchekker."
"Put me through, then, would you? There's a good chap. Sorry it couldn't have been longer. Just saying hi as a courtesy, really."
"Yes. Of course… Er… I'll put you through."
"See you around," the calling-end Duncan said automatically, then thought about it. "Well, probably not, actually."
In setting up a file giving the background information, they had prepared themselves better than seemed to have been the case with the group the original Hunt had represented. But then again, that group looked as it had still been working on the stability issue and so perhaps they hadn't been worried about the finer points just yet.
Sandy Holmes took the call in Danchekker's lab over in Alien Life Sciences. She stared uncertainly out from the screen for a second or two, jerked her head around to look back over her shoulder, then at the screen again. "What is this?" she muttered half to herself. "A recording? Is it some kind of joke? Hey, guys, who is this?"
"No, not a recording or a joke. it's me, Vic," Hunt said. "I'm looking for Vic."
He could read Sandy's mind: The image is interacting. He's real. She wrestled with the conundrum, gave up, and turned her head again. "Chris, Vic… Come and look at this." The Sandy watching from a few feet behind Duncan just smiled. She didn't try to muscle in by repeating Duncan's routine of a minute earlier. There would be plenty more times. Two more faces appeared on the screen: Hunt, matter-of-fact; Danchekker looking irritable, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of something. "It's not a recording," Sandy informed them. "It interacts."
"Yes, it does. Try me," Hunt offered.
Danchekker blinked rapidly several times through his spectacles, then turned to the Hunt who was with him, "What kind of stunt is this, Vic? If it has a point, I'm afraid it eludes me. We really do have a lot to get through."
The other Hunt shook his head helplessly. "No, honestly, Chris, I don't know any more than you do. It's got nothing to…" He looked back from the screen as an answer suggested itself. "It has to be a VISAR creation. VISAR, are you in on this? What's the idea?"
"I am, but only as the phone operator. It isn't a creation," VISAR's voice replied on the circuit. In an aside voice that was clearly for local ears only, it inquired, "Do you want me to tell him?"
"Sure," Hunt said.
"It's you. Or another one of you, that is. We're plugged into your comnet from orbit from Thurien. Another Thurien, that is."
Hunt could almost hear the thoughts racing through his other self's head. "A Multiverse version?" the image said finally. "MV cross-communication? Does that mean you've cracked it?"
Cheers and applause came from all around. VISAR showed a copy of the panned view it was sending through of the room full of Thuriens and Terrans.
"Extraordinary!" Danchekker pronounced weakly.
The subsequent exchange followed roughly the lines it had with Duncan, but going into a little more detail.
The package of technical data was just a gift thrown in as a goodwill gesture. The people in the universe sending it could derive no benefit, since they of course possessed the information already. The real purpose of this series of tests, which would visit other versions of both Earth and Thurien, and of which this was just a beginning, would be for VISAR to extract as much reference information as it could collect describing the universe that the probe had arrived in-physical characteristics; geography; history; political and social organization; technology; arts; customs; anything that could be accessed in the time available. By correlating the results of many such searches with the settings programmed in at the projector, it was hoped to build up an enormous database that would enable the "affinity" parameter to be interpreted in more everyday-meaningful terms. The phone chat really wasn't necessary. In fact, most of the planned tests omitted it. It could only get repetitive, and the novelty would doubtless wear off very quickly. But in the meantime, the impulse to try a few just to see the results had been irresistible. It also explained, perhaps, why the original alter-ego of Hunt had been so agreeably chatty.
Hunt refrained from saying anything about investment tips for Jerry Santello. It looked as if his other self was going to have more than enough to think about. And besides, he wasn't really that sure himself what the Formaflex business was all about.
Now that it was possible to identify where and when a projected probe had arrived at, this series of tests also enabled another prediction of Multiverse theory to be verified. An intriguing thought that had occurred to everybody involved was that sending probes ahead in time to closely related universes sounded like the next best thing to being able to read the future. The energy balance equations, however, said it wasn't quite so simple. The resolution of uncertainty that events unfolding in the forward direction of time represented took form in the second law of thermodynamics, expressed as increasing entropy. Multiverse physics related entropy and energy in such a way that projecting into another universe required more and more energy as the time of the target reality came closer to "now" at the sending end, becoming infinite when the time difference became zero. In other words, an energy barrier seemed to exist that precluded peeking into the future. Whether that too might be broken one day, no one was prepared to say or even guess. The tests at MP2 confirmed, however, that the restriction was very real for the time being.