Three seats are positioned before instrument consoles. Right now the seats face forward, towards the nose of the craft, but Bado can see they are hinged so they will tip up when the craft is landing vertically. Bado spots a big, chunky periscope sticking out from the nose, evidently there to provide a view out during a landing.
There are big picture windows set in the walls. The windows frame slabs of jet-black, star-sprinkled sky.
A man is sitting in the central pilot’s chair. He is wearing a leather flight jacket, a peaked cap, and—Bado can’t believe it—he is smoking a pipe, for God’s sake. The guy sticks out a hand. “Mr Bado. I’m glad to meet you. Jim Richards, RAF.”
“That’s Colonel Bado.” Bado shakes the hand. “US Air Force. Lately of NASA.”
“NASA?”
“National Aeronautics and Space Administration…”
Richards nods. “American. Interesting. Not many of the alternates are American. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to see more of your ship. Looked a little cramped for the three of you.”
“It wasn’t our ship. It was a Russian, a one-man lander.”
“Really,” Richards murmurs, not very interested. “Take a seat.” He waves Bado at one of the two seats beside him; Taine takes the other, sipping tea through a straw. Richards asks, “Have you ever seen a ship like this before, Colonel Bado?”
Bado glances around. The main controls are a conventional stick-and-rudder design, adapted for spaceflight; the supplementary controls are big, clunky switches, wheels, and levers. The fascia of the control panel is made of wood. And in one place, where a maintenance panel has been removed, Bado sees the soft glow of vacuum tubes.
“No,” he says. “Not outside the comic books.”
Richards and Taine laugh.
“It must take a hell of a launch system.”
“Oh,” says Richards, “we have good old Beta to help us with that.”
“Beta?”
“This lunar ship is called Alpha,” Taine says. “Beta gives us a piggyback out of Earth’s gravity. We launch from Woomera, in South Australia. Beta is a hypersonic athodyd—”
Richards winks at Bado. “These double-domes, eh? He means Beta is an atomic ramjet.”
Bado boggles. “You launch an atomic rocket from the middle of Australia? How do you manage containment of the exhaust?”
Taine looks puzzled. “What containment?”
“You must tell me all about your spacecraft,” Richards says.
Bado, haltingly, starts to describe the Apollo system.
Richards listens politely enough, but after a while Bado can see his eyes drifting to his instruments, and he begins to fiddle with his pipe, knocking out the dottle into a big enclosed ashtray.
Richards becomes aware of Bado watching him. “Oh, you must forgive me, Colonel Bado. It’s just that one encounters so many alternates.”
“You do, huh.”
“The Massolite, you know. That damn quantum-mechanical leakage. Plessey just can’t get the thing tuned correctly. Such a pity. Anyhow, don’t you worry; the boffins on the ground will put you to rights, I’m sure.”
Bado is deciding he doesn’t like these British. They are smug, patronising, icy. He can’t tell what they are thinking.
Taine leans forward. “Almost time, Jim.”
“Aha!” Richards gets hold of his joystick. “The main event.” He twists the stick, and Bado hears what sounds like the whir of flywheels, deep in the guts of the ship. Stars slide past the windows. “A bit of showmanship, Colonel Bado. I want to line us up to give the passengers the best possible view. And us, of course. After all, this is a grandstand seat, for the most dramatic astronomical event of the century—what?”
The Moon, fat and grey and more than half-full, slides into the frame of the windows.
The Moon—Moon Five, Bado assumes it to be—looks like a ball of glass, its surface cracked and complex, as if starred by buckshot. Tinged pale white, the Moon’s centre looms out at Bado, given three-dimensional substance by the Earthlight’s shading.
The Moon looks different. He tries to figure out why.
There, close to the central meridian, are the bright pinpricks of Tycho, to the south, and Copernicus, in the north. He makes out the familiar pattern of the seas of the eastern hemisphere: Serenitatis, Crisium, Tranquillitatis—grey lakes of frozen lava framed by brighter, older lunar uplands.
He supposes there must be no Apollo 11 LM descent stage, standing on this version of the Sea of Tranquillity.
The Moon is mostly full, but he can see lights in the remaining crescent of darkness. They are the abandoned colonies of Moon Five.
Something is still wrong, though. The western hemisphere doesn’t look right. He takes his anchor from Copernicus. There is Mare Procellarum, to the western limb, and to the north of that—
Nothing but bright highlands.
“Hey,” he says. “Where the hell’s Mare Imbrium?”
Richards looks at him, puzzled, faintly disapproving.
Bado points. “Up there. In the northwest. A big impact crater—the biggest—flooded with lava. Eight hundred miles across.”
Richards frowns, and Taine touches Bado’s arm. “All the alternate Moons are different to some degree,” he says, placating. “Differences of detail—”
“Mare Imbrium is not a goddamn detail.” Bado feels patronised again. “You’re talking about my Moon, damn it.” But if the Imbrium impact has never happened, no wonder the surface of Moon Five looks different.
Richards checks his wrist watch. “Any second now,” he says. “If the big-brains have got it right—”
There is a burst of light, in the Moon’s northwest quadrant. The surface in the region of the burst seems to shatter, the bright old highland material melting and subsiding into a red-glowing pool, a fiery lake that covers perhaps an eighth of the Moon’s face. Bado watches huge waves, concentric, wash out across that crimson, circular wound.
Even from this distance Bado can see huge debris clouds streaking across the lunar surface, obscuring and burying older features, and laying down bright rays that plaster across the Moon’s face.
The lights of the night-side colonies wink out, one by one.
Richards takes his pipe out of his mouth. “Good God almighty,” he says. “Thank heavens we got all our people off.”
“Only just in time, sir,” Taine says.
Bado nods. “Oh, I get it. Here, this was the Imbrium impact. Three billion years late.”
Richards and Taine look at him curiously.
It turned out that to build a teleport device—a “Star Trek” beaming machine—you needed to know about quantum mechanics. Particularly the Uncertainty Principle.
According to one interpretation, the Uncertainty Principle was fundamentally caused by there being an infinite number of parallel universes, all lying close to each other—as Bado pictured it—like the pages of a book. The universes blurred together at the instant of an event, and split off afterwards.
The Uncertainty Principle said you could never measure the position and velocity of any particle with absolute precision. But to teleport that was exactly what you needed to do: to make a record of an object, transmit it, and re-create the payload at the other end.
But there was a way to get around the Uncertainty Principle. At least in theory.
The quantum properties of particles could become entangled: fundamentally linked in their information content. What those British must have done is take sets of entangled particles, left one half on their Moon as a transmitter, and planted the other half on the Earth.