“Please, everyone, call me Thomas,” Hockenberry said while distracted. Sixty-two percent difference? I’d almost be floating like a balloon on Mars… jumping twenty yards at a leap. Nonsense.
“You didn’t observe this gravitational difference,” said Asteague/Che, not framing it as a question.
“Not really,” agreed Hockenberry. It was always a little easier walking after the return to Olympos after a long day observing the Trojan War—and not just on the mountain, but in the scholics barracks at the base of the huge massif. A little easier—a little lighter in the walking and carrying loads—but sixty-two percent difference? No way in hell. “There was a difference,” he added, “but not such a profound one.”
“You didn’t notice a profound difference, Dr. Hockenberry, because the gravity of the Mars you have been living on for the past ten years—and which we have been fighting on for the past eight Earth-standard months—is ninety-three point eight-two-one percent Earth normal.”
Hockenberry thought about this for a moment. “So?” he said at last. “The gods tweaked the gravity while they were adding the air and oceans. They are, after all, gods.”
“They’re something,” agreed Asteague/Che, “but not what they appear.”
“Is changing the gravity of a planet such a big deal?” asked Hockenberry.
There was a silence, and while Hockenberry did not see any of the moravecs turn their heads or eyes or whatever to look at any of the other moravecs, he had the sense that they were all busy communing on some radio band or the other. How to explain to this idiot human?
Finally Suma IV, the tall Ganymedan, said, “It is a very big deal.”
“Bigger even than the terraforming of a world like the original Mars in less than a century and a half,” piped in Cho Li. “Which is impossible.”
“Gravity equals mass,” said Retrograde Sinopessen.
“It does?” said Hockenberry, hearing how stupid he sounded but not caring. “I always thought it was what held things down.”
“Gravity is an effect of mass on space/time,” continued the silver spider. “The current Mars is three point nine-six times the density of water. The original Mars—the pre-terraformed world we observed not much more than a century ago—was three point nine-four times the density of water.”
“That doesn’t sound like too much of a change,” said Hockenberry.
“It is not,” agreed Asteague/Che. “It in no way accounts for an increase in gravitation attraction of almost fifty-six percent.”
“Gravity is also an acceleration,” Cho Li said in her musical tones.
Now they’d lost Hockenberry completely. He’d come here to learn about the upcoming visit to Earth and to hear why they wanted him to join them, not to be lectured like a particularly slow eighth grade science student.
“So they—someone, not the gods—changed Mars’ gravity,” he said. “And you think it’s a very big deal.”
“It is a very big deal, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Asteague/Che. “Whoever and whatever manipulated Mars’ gravity this way is a master of quantum gravity. The Holes… as they’ve come to be called… are quantum tunnels that also bend and manipulate gravity.”
“Wormholes,” said Hockenberry. “I know about them.” From Star Trek, he thought but did not say. “Black holes,” he added. Then, “And white holes.” He’d just exhausted his entire vocabulary on this subject. Even nonscience types like old Dr. Hockenberry at the end of the Twentieth Century had known that the universe was full of wormholes connecting distant places in this galaxy and others, and that to go through a wormhole, you went through a black hole and came out a white hole. Or maybe vice versa.
Asteague/Che shook his head in that Mahnmut way. “Not wormholes. Brane Holes … as in membrane. It looks like the post-humans in Earth orbit used black holes to create very temporary wormholes, but the Brane Holes—and there is only one left connecting Mars and Ilium, you must remember; the others have lost stability and decayed away—are not wormholes.”
“You’d be dead if you tried to go through a wormhole or a black hole,” said Cho Li.
“Spaghettified,” said General Beh bin Adee. The rockvec sounded as if he enjoyed the concept of spaghettification.
“Being spaghettified …” began Retrograde Sinopessen.
“I get the idea,” said Hockenberry. “So this use of quantum gravity and these quantum Brane Holes makes the adversary much scarier even than you’d feared.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.
“And you’re taking this big spaceship to Earth to find out who or what created these Holes, terraformed Mars, and probably created the gods as well.”
“Yes.”
“And you want me along.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” said Hockenberry. “What possible contribution could I make to …” He paused and touched the lump under his tunic, the heavy circle against his chest. “The QT medallion.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.
“Back when you guys first arrived, I loaned the medallion to you for six days. I was afraid you’d never give it back. You did tests on me as well… blood, DNA, the whole nine yards. I would have guessed that you’d replicated a thousand QT medallions by now.”
“If we were able to replicate a dozen… half a dozen… one more,” growled General Beh bin Adee, “the war with the gods would be over, Olympos occupied.”
“It’s not possible for us to build a duplicate QT device,” said Cho Li.
“Why?” Hockenberry’s headache was killing him.
“The QT medallion was customized to your mind and body,” Asteague/Che said in his mellifluous James Mason way. “Your mind and body were… customized… to work with the QT medallion.”
Hockenberry thought about this. Finally he shook his head and touched the heavy medallion under his tunic again. “That doesn’t make any sense. This thing wasn’t standard issue, you know. We scholics had to go to prearranged places to get back to Olympos—the gods QT’d us back. It was sort of a beam-me-up-Scotty thing, if you understand what I mean, which you can’t.”
“Yes, we understand perfectly,” said the Lionel transformer box on its millimeter-thin silver-spider legs. “I love that program. I have all the episodes recorded. Especially the first series… I’ve always wondered if there was some sort of hidden physical-romantic liaison between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.”
Hockenberry started to reply, stopped. “Look,” he said at last, “the goddess Aphrodite gave me this QT medallion so that I could spy on Athena, whom she wanted to kill. But that was more than nine years after I started work as a scholic, shuttling between Olympos and Ilium. How could my body have been ‘customized’ to work with the medallion when nobody could have known that …” He stopped. A hint of nausea was creeping in under the headache. He wondered if the air was good in this blue bubble.
“You were originally… reconstructed… to work with the QT medallion,” said Asteague/Che. “Just as the gods were designed to QT on their own. Of this we are sure. Perhaps the answer to why lies back on Earth or in Earth orbit in one of the hundreds of thousands of post-human orbital devices and cities there.”
Hockenberry sat back in his chair. He’d noticed when they sat down at the table that his stool had been the only one with a back on it. The moravecs were very considerate that way.
“You want me along on the expedition,” he said, “so that I could QT back here if things go wrong. I’m like one of those emergency buoys that nuclear submarines used to carry in my time on Earth. They only launched it when they knew they were screwed.”