Hence, the arrivals from Earth found the Thuriens in a state of considerable excitement. This was not only on account of the thurion mystery being solved, but additionally because things had already progressed significantly further. The key to the whole business, it turned out, was Thurien gravitic technology. The reason why Maxwell's equations didn't yield a longitudinal wave component was that they related only to the aspect of the underlying matrix that was described electromagnetically. Charged objects in motion experienced an electrical drag that increased with velocity. This meant that the faster they moved, the more they resisted further acceleration, which was another way of saying they exhibited an increase in mass. Energy supplied in excess of what they could absorb by changing their motion was disposed of as radiation. Eventually, all of the energy being applied would be radiated, beyond which point no further acceleration was possible and the effective mass would be infinite. This, of course, described all the experimental work carried out on Earth through the previous century and interpreted in terms of relativity theory, which had pronounced the limit on velocity to be universal. But in fact it only applied to electrical phenomena-which was neither here nor there as far as Terran scientists were concerned, since they had no means of accelerating electrically neutral matter to high speeds anyway. But the Thuriens did.
Applying their gravitic methods to the matrix dynamics proposed by Hunt produced a more general form of field equations that contained a longitudinal component with solutions perpendicular to all of the four dimensions contained in the electromagnetic tensor, which could only mean trans-Multiverse propagation. Now that they were on the right track, the Thuriens at Quelsang were already transporting away to elsewhere in the Mulitiverse-the term they used was "multiporting"-electrons and protons, the building blocks of tangible matter. The next step would be to try simple molecules.
A peculiar implication of the whole state of affairs was that if they were sending particle-energy quanta into nearby other universes, then at least some versions of their other selves who lived in those universes would be doing the same thing too. This suggested that, in principle anyway, it might be possible to detect electrons, protons, molecules, or whatever materializing here as a result of corresponding experiments going on next door. The Thuriens had been looking for such events, but the results so far had been negative. From VISAR's latest computations, it seemed that such a result was to be expected. Porthik Eesyan explained why to Hunt while they were observing some of the test runs to multiport molecules. It was several days since the Tramline group's arrival. The introductory tours and demonstrations of the Multiporter, as the project had come to be designated, were over. The combined team were getting down to business. Hunt and Eesyan were both physically there, not neurally coupled in remotely to a composite creation. Experimenters couldn't do much real experimenting in one of VISAR's virtual-world settings.
"Is your head in a mood for big numbers today, Vic?" Eesyan stood over a foot taller than Hunt, dark gray, almost black in hue, his torso covered by a loose-fitting coat that reached to the knees, brightly colored in an elaborate woven design. Ganymeans did not posses hair, but the skin at the tops of their heads roughened into a ribbed, scaly texture, a bit like candlewick, that could range through as many color combinations and hues as bird plumage. Eesyan's was blue and green, taking on streaks of orange toward the rear.
"I'm ready to risk it. Try me," Hunt said.
"Multiverse branches really are as thin as some of us have speculated. In theory, they could differ by as little as a single quantum transition. There could be as many of them as the number of discrete quantum transitions in the entire lifetime of the universe. Pick anything you like for the number of zeros. It won't make any difference that matters."
Hunt pursed his lips in a silent whistle while he thought about it.
Considering the enormity of what it implied, the Multiporter was really quite a modest piece of hardware as Thurien constructions went. The projection chamber itself, which was where the actual multiporting happened, took the unremarkable form of a square metal housing about the size of a microwave oven, upon which an array of shiny tubes converged at various angles from pieces of equipment mounted in a supporting framework extending around the sides, overhead, and into a bay beneath. A forest of sensors and instrumentation filling the remainder of the framework, a worktop and monitoring station, several desks, and banks of conduits, tubes, and other connections disappearing behind the walls and down through the floor completed the scene. The chamber at the center was where matter was being induced to disappear into other realities. It was adequate for the type of experiments being conducted currently. Should success later lead to more ambitious attempts involving larger objects, it was anticipated that a scaled-up Multiporter would be operated out in space, away from Thurien. Eesyan already had some designers looking into it. Short-term budget cutting was meaningless in a system that had no concept nor need of cost accounting.
A volume of space inside the chamber was also where the attempts were being made to detect matter multiported from other realities. By the bizarre logic of the situation, if other nearby selves were multiporting matter out of their universe using their version of the same equipment, then it seemed to follow that this would be the place to look for it in this universe. Hence, the Multiporter's time was divided between operating in sending and detecting modes. This raised the question that if their other selves were working to the same schedule, nobody would detect anything because they would all be sending when no one was looking, and looking when no one was sending. The answer adopted was to use a local quantum randomizer to switch between modes. Assuming their counterparts would think the same thing, the idea was that random generators driven by a different sequence of quantum processes-which was what, by definition, made a different reality different-would yield a different pattern of switching times, giving periods of overlap between modes of sending from one universe and attempting detection in another. The negative outcome had caused this line of supposition to be reexamined without any obvious flaw turning up, but Eesyan was now saying there were other reasons why it was to be expected.
A "segment" was the term that had been given to a "vertical" slice of the Multiverse-a self-contained universe that beings like Thuriens and humans inhabited, and within which change in the form of an ordering of events was perceived to happen. In terms of the not really accurate but more easily visualized analogy of pages in a book, it appeared that the pages were astoundingly thin. "It seems to be the way some people guessed," Eesyan confirmed. "A particle traveling through a segment would exist in it for a vanishingly short time, making it indistinguishable from background quantum noise. Impossible to detect in practice."
Hunt had hoped for some kind of bulk averaging effect whereby individual quantum events would seldom give rise to any discernible difference at higher, more macroscopic levels. That would, in effect, have made the pages thicker. But he wasn't about to argue with VISAR over a matter of computation. "Do macroscopic probabilities get bigger?" he asked Eesyan. In other words, would larger objects take longer to traverse a segment, making their detection easier?