But it was only for a moment. The stew was Opril's best. He pushed the morbid images from his mind and buttered a hunk of crusty bread to mop the dish.
"How is it?" his uncle asked.
"Mmm… Good."
"You've gone very quiet. It's not like you."
"Just hungry, I guess. It's been a long day."
Urgran looked at him. "Don't take too much notice of all the talk, Kles. They're just posturing. It can't get that bad. Everyone knows that."
"Urg's right. Perasmon can't be serious," Rez said again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Multiporter project was taking on characteristically Thurien dimensions. The original Quelsang transfer chamber, built to handle no more than tiny specks of matter to prove the principle, had been scaled up to the version contained in MP2, which could accommodate devices like communications relays and instrument probes. MP2 was now superseded in turn by MP3, otherwise known as the "Gate."
It took the form of a volume of space defined by an array of sixteen projection generators hanging at controlled positions a few hundred miles from MP2, which was where the control center for MP3 was located. They were called "bells," although each was more the shape of a tapered cylinder flaring at the wider end into a truncated hollow cone-a shape vaguely suggesting a common pattern of desk-lamp shade. In both diameter and length, however, the bells measured almost a thousand feet. The power to drive them came via the Thurien h-space grid. They were positioned and oriented in a spherical configuration that focused their outputs onto a central "transfer zone" a little over a half mile in diameter. This configuration was the "Gate" from which objects projected out across the Multiverse were launched. The Gate transfer zone was large enough to accommodate the Shapieron.
Experiments had not reached the stage of sending the Shapieron anywhere yet. The ship had been moved from Jevlen, however, and was currently being refitted at a construction and overhaul facility elsewhere in the Gistar system. At the same time, it was being equipped with its own M-space bubble generator, which later tests performed at MP2 had shown would be necessary for transferring objects significantly larger than simple instrument platforms and communications relays.
With such a smaller device, the elongated dumbbell bubble that suppressed convergence effects at the sending end, at the same time preventing dispersion while the projected object was stabilizing at the remote end, was created using energy supplied by the projector. However, this method would not be adequate for producing a remote-end lobe large enough to contain something the size of the Shapieron. The connecting "umbilical" filament couldn't be made to carry the load. Therefore, an additional source would be necessary at the remote end, and the obvious way to get it there seemed to be to build it into the transferred object itself.
The test "raft" centered in the Gate was a dummy structure half the size of the Shapieron, containing an instrument and sensor platform, and a duplicate installation of the Shapieron's intended on-board M-wave gear. It also carried a selection of plant and animal specimens for ascertaining the effects on biological processes. Hunt sat in the MP3 Control Center at MP2, taking in the situation from screens commanding the floor, plus VISAR-supplied avco visuals. He was here physically once more. There was no nonexistent observation room, complete with virtual bar, this time.
Almost a year had passed since the group's first arrival at Thurien. However, with acceptance of the new mission that Calazar had called for in his dramatic presentation to the Thurien Grand Assembly, the workload had not only intensified but widened, as everything that had been pieced together concerning Lunarian Minerva suddenly became relevant. On top, there had been Eesyan's insistence on reverifying the engineering from the ground up. Without Thurien methods and the computational resources of VISAR to back them up things, things would never have gotten even close to progressing this far.
All the same, most of the group had managed to fit in at least one trip back to Earth during this time. Sandy and Duncan had broadened the interpretation of their role of assisting Danchekker and Hunt to involving themselves with the Thuriens in analyzing as much as was known of Minervan history in the period leading up to its destruction, but at the same time managed to fit in a couple of weeks skiing in the Andes as well. Danchekker had spent most of the interim at Thurien immersed in his biological and philosophical pursuits, returning once or twice in response to summonses from Ms. Mulling involving official duties that he was unable to evade. Sonnebrandt was currently back there, having been called home on some family affair, and when he would be returning was as uncertain. Mildred had completed her researches and returned to Earth to work on her book, while Chien had not been back at all, but stayed on to follow the progress of construction at the MP3 Gate. She was the only other Terran present with Hunt at MP3 to observe the test.
In fact, Hunt's work had taken him back to Earth the most, involving long sessions with Caldwell to redefine Tramline's part in the new overall strategy. Caldwell was patched into the proceedings too, coming through from Earth in an avco window. Hunt was pretty sure that more had gone on behind the scenes to all this that involved Caldwell somehow. Caldwell was showing more interest in the day-to-day details than was usual for his kind of management style. Hunt had picked up rumors among the Thuriens that the vision with which Calazar had dazzled the Assembly owed much to Caldwell in its earliest stages of conception. But when Hunt tried to raise the subject out of curiosity, Caldwell had been evasive. Hunt knew from long experience that when Caldwell decided he didn't want to talk about an issue, that was the end of the matter.
Since Minerva at the time the mission was aimed at had been inhabited by human Lunarians, it had been agreed humans should be included in the team to be sent on it. Anyone suggesting otherwise would have had a tough time dealing with Hunt and the others who had been there from the beginning, in any case. Caldwell had made it clear that no one among them needed to feel any commitment to the new mission, but the thought of not going hadn't entered any of their heads. As was to be expected, when the news went around back on Earth, various other interests had made their presence felt, wanting to get in on the act and send people too. But they would have been negative assets, resented as an intrusion into the team. Caldwell was alive to the mood, and since disruptions at this point would have compromised the effectiveness of his people who were on the spot, he took it as part of his business to mount defenses on the home front. Hunt could only conclude that in this Caldwell was fully successful, since none of the wrangling and background politics had percolated through to Thurien.
The object of the present experiment was to send the test raft to a marked alternate reality of the Multiverse, and then bring it back-a pretty important prerequisite to have mastered if they were going to be sending Thuriens and Terrans. It was still not possible to "map" the Multiverse in terms of the attributes pertaining to a particular reality, for example, "A universe where Genghis Khan wasn't recalled after defeating the Prussian defenders of Europe, overran the West, and the dominant civilization that arose to colonize the world was Asiatic." No ready way had been found to connect "change," as perceived subjectively in the countless directions making up the Multiverse, with anything that could be measured as physics; indeed, whether such a connection existed at all was by no means certain. VISAR had been trying to refine the concept of "affinity," which yielded rough measure of how far a different reality was from the familiar one, but it could be notoriously unspecific when it came to indicating how they were different. A universe where Earth had no Moon, one in which Mars still possessed oceans, and another where Jupiter was missing two of its principal satellites all registered comparable affinity indexes. Why this should be, nobody even had a theory. At this stage it was impossible to say if sense would ever be made of it.