The beacon would play a crucial role in bringing the raft back. Multiverse navigation was still far too much of an inexact business for VISAR to be sure of finding the same place again by aiming blind. "Place" meant not only a given point in space at a some moment in time, but also a particular variant among countless shades of "likeness," and tests had shown that repeating what appeared to be the same parameters was no guarantee of returning to the same one; in fact, it had never yet succeeded in doing so once. But having an active beacon already there gave VISAR something to "home" on-hence, its name. The schedule called for a five-minute pause before they attempted reestablishing contact. Around the room, Thuriens were leaning back into more relaxed positions, stretching, and turning to talk to others.
"Oh, and I meant to tell you," Caldwell said. "We've had Lieutenant Polk bugging us here again."
"From the feds? You're kidding."
"He found out you were back just recently. Now I'm in trouble. Seems I should have notified them. Talk to them or do something, will you, Vic? Get him off my back."
"Okay. But I'll need to figure out what angle to take on it," Hunt promised.
Formaflex had recently gone public after a trial of marketing a method of duplicating objects using Thurien scanning and nano-assembler technology. They claimed that they were limiting the process to areas that couldn't be tackled profitably by conventional methods, but the manufacturing sector saw it as the thin end of a wedge and were panicking. The rise of Formaflex's stock price had set records, which of course was what the original tip had been about. Hunt didn't think he would have passed anything comparable on in like manner himself, even without the trouble he had experienced. He could only conclude that there was at least one version of himself loose in the Multiverse somewhere that had even less of a head for the world of finance than he did.
"You know it will spread," Chien commented. It was a topic she returned to regularly. "Earth is going to have to adapt to Thurien values eventually. The money system is designed to tally the checks and balances of a zero-sum economy. Every credit in one book has to be balanced by a debit somewhere else. But once Thurien technology is introduced, the exchange of material goods that the system assumes ceases to be the dominant factor. Their wealth lies in their knowledge, which is subject to a different arithmetic. Sharing what you have doesn't lose you anything. The more that's given, the richer everyone gets. The sum is an exponential growth."
"I don't think Wall Street is quite ready for that yet, Chien," Hunt said.
"It's going to have to learn. The genie is coming out of the bottle."
"I think Maeve already understands it," Caldwell told them.
Hunt realized that consternation was breaking out among the Thuriens. "Vic!" Chien exclaimed at the same time. He followed her gaze back to the screen showing the transmission coming back from the beacon. The most extraordinary thing was happening. Where there had been simply the image of the raft floating in space against the background of stars, now there were two rafts. Even as he watched, one of them vanished, then reappeared moments later in a different position. Then there were three rafts; then nothing at all.
As the chaotic pattern continued, voices among the Thuriens called for the test to be aborted. But Chien cut in on avco, addressing the Controller. "It started as soon as the connection was broken. Try restoring it."
Several seconds went by while he wrestled with the decision. Then, "We'll try it. Power the bubble back up." The Gate bubble was restored and projected using the homing information provided by the beacon. After a couple of corrections, the screens feeding from the raft came to life again. At the same time the view of the raft being sent by the beacon stabilized. Five minutes elapsed, ten… No further sign of the problem appeared.
"We will continue as scheduled," the Controller announced. The last part was to bring the raft back again. It went without a hitch. The bells were brought up to full power, VISAR initiated the reversed phase sequence, and seconds later the raft reappeared in the Gate, looking as if it had never left. The views from it showed the universe as seen from MP3 again. In the cages, the animals were scampering about, feeding, scratching, or just sitting lost on their own brooding, all as if nothing had happened.
Clearly, what had been observed was some kind of timeline convergence effect. Hitherto, convergence had been a phenomenon occurring in the vicinity of multiporting projectors, such as the Quelsang prototype and the scaled-up chamber at MP2. But there was no projector on the raft. It carried only instrumentation and communications gear, and the test model of the onboard bubble generator intended for the Shapieron. Lots of probes fitted for instrumentation and communications tasks had been sent over many months without anything like this happening before. So the effect had to be caused by the onboard bubble generator. But it had only happened when the umbilical connecting back to the Gate-end bubble was severed. This suggested that it was a consequence of something that was inhibited while the bubble existed in its double-ended dumbbell form.
Further experiments were performed using observer probes fitted with MV-wave analyzers to monitor events around the raft from close quarters. It was found that the core region of the Gate bubble, inside which the projector-end convergence zone was trapped, also extended as a thin filament inside the umbilical to the far end. Here, it formed a convergence lobe inside the remote-end bubble too, but as long as the two bubbles were connected, a "tension" between them kept it down to a small core region-so much so that its existence hadn't even been suspected before.
However, when the Gate-end was deactivated, the onboard power source at the raft end expanded the remote bubble and its core convergence zone to produce bizarre observable effects. The solution was to deactivate the remote bubble as soon as the projected standing wave had stabilized and was unable to disperse. While the precise physics was still to be worked out, repeated tests showed the method to be reliable. An interesting point to note in the course of all this was that they had believed the convergence problem to be solved, gone ahead accordingly to the next step of sending instrumented probes equipped for communication back, and then discovered that convergence was a more subtle business than they had thought. This perhaps explained the episode of the similarly conceived device from another reality that had precipitated the virtual craziness a while back, which had puzzled Hunt.
Figure 2.
(A) Quelsang prototype. See p. 132.
(B) MP2 bubble contains convergence, but dispersion of test object not eliminated. See p. 208.
(C) Extended bubble prevents dispersion. See p. 209.
(D) Detached bubble. Onboard power drives expansion of bubble and remote-end convergence zone. See p. 250.
(E) Collapsing of remote bubble after stabilization eliminates convergence. See p. 252.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Hunt would never have believed he'd see the day when humans showed sentimentality over a computer. After further successful tests involving the raft, the next major step was to scale things up to operational dimensions by repeating the experiment with the Shapieron itself-the size of the Gate configuration had been decided with this as the eventual aim. The Shapieron was the only ship of its kind in existence, and if anything went wrong, it would be irreplaceable. But everything leading up to this crucial test had gone well enough to satisfy even Eesyan, and eventually the time came when the moment of decision had to be faced.